McGill.CA / Science / Department of Physics
Informal Pizza Seminar

The physics of Hanbury Brown-Twiss correlations
in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Qing-Hui Zhang

McGill

The physics of high energy heavy-ion collisions has grown into one of the major research field of modern nuclear physics. Hanbury Brown-Twiss (HBT) interferometry, the measurement of two identical particle correlations, has become a very important technique in heavy-ion collisions, enabling one to probe the evolving geometry of the collision volume. In this informal talk, we will discuss the basic idea of HBT interferometry and its application in heavy-ion collisions. Multi-pion symmetrization effect on the normal used two-pion interferometry formula are studied. It is shown that pion interferometry should depend on the pion multiplicity distribution which was neglected in the previous studies. For a special kind of pion multiplicity distribution, the widely used pion interferometry are regained. It was also shown that multipion Bose-Einstein correlation make the average radius of the pion source become smaller. Recent HBT results of heavy-ion collisions are given.

Thurday, June 8th 2000, 13:00
Ernest Rutherford Physics Building, room 326