What to Expect When You're Expecting: Femtoscopy at the LHC

Abstract

A huge systematics of femtoscopic measurements have been used over the past 20 years to characterize the system created in heavy ion collisions. These measurements cover two orders of magnitude in energy, and with LHC beams imminent, this range will be extended by more than another order of magnitude. Here, I discuss theoretical expectations of femtoscopy of $A+A$ and $p+p$ collisions at the LHC, based on Boltzmann and hydrodynamic calculations, as well as on naive extrapolation of existing systematics.

6 pages; 8 figures; Invited talk at the Second Workshop on Particle Correlations and Femtoscopy (WPCF06), Sept 9-11 2006, Sao Paulo, Brazil