Three-Pion Interferometry of Relativistic Nuclear Collisions

Abstract

Three-pion interferometry is investigated for new information on the space-time structure of the pion source created in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The two- and three-pion correlations are numerically computed for incoherent source functions based on the Bjorken hydrodynamical model, over a wide range of the kinematic variables. New information provided by three-pion interferometry, different from that provided by two-pion interferometry, should appear in the phases of the Fourier transform of the source function. Variables are identified that would be sensitive to the phases and suitable for observation. For a positive, chaotic source function, however, a variation of the three-pion phase is found to be difficult to extract from experiments. Effects of asymmetry of the source function are also examined.

19 pages, 16 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev. C

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Three-Pion Hanbury-Brown-Twiss Correlations in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions from the STAR Experiment
• One and two dimensional analysis of 3pi correlations measured in Pb+Pb interactions
• Analyses of multi-pion Hanbury-Brown-Twiss correlations for the pion-emitting sources with Bose-Einstein condensation
• Projected Three-Pion Correlation Functions
• Normalized multi-pion Hanbury Brown and Twiss correlation functions of pion-emitting sources with Bose-Einstein condensation
• Effects of Disoriented Chiral Condensates on Two- and Three-Pion Correlations of Relativistic Nuclear Collisions
• Possible formulations for three-charged particles correlations in terms of Coulomb wave functions