PHENIX Results of Three-Particle Bose-Einstein Correlations in \({\sqrt{s_{NN}}}\) = 200 GeV Au+Au Collisions

Abstract

Bose-Einstein correlations (BECs) of identical hadrons reveal information about hadron creation from the strongly interacting matter formed in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. The measurement of three-particle correlations may in particular shed light on hadron creation mechanisms beyond thermal/chaotic emission. In this paper, we show the status of PHENIX measurements of three-pion correlations as a function of momentum differences within the triplets. We analyze the shape of the correlation functions through the assumption of Lévy sources and a proper treatment of the Coulomb interaction within the triplets. We measure the three-particle correlation strength (λ 3), which, together with the two-particle correlation strength λ 2 , encodes information about hadron creation mechanisms. From a consistent analysis of two-and three-particle correlation strengths, we establish a new experimental measure of thermalization and coherence in the source.

Two- and three-pion Lévy femtoscopy with PHENIX

“…Hence if κ 3 = 1, that would point to pion production beyond the core-halo model, such as coherence, as also discussed in Ref. [24].…”

“…In addition to track matching cuts, we applied pair cuts to reduce the effect of track merging and splitting, as detailed in Refs. [17,[21][22][23][24].…”

“…where q is the momentum difference, R is the K dependent source size (or its length of homogeneity), and α is the Lévy-stability exponent, resulting from the anomalous diffusion, and probably also depending on K. The α parameter is interesting also because it may be connected to the critical exponent η, appearing in the power-law exponent of the spatial correlation function at the critical point [20]. Recently, Lévy sources have been utilized [17,[21][22][23][24] to describe the particle emitting source. In present paper we report on the recent Lévy femtoscopy results of the PHENIX experiment.…”