Recent HBT results in Au+Au and p+p collisions from PHENIX

TL;DR

This paper reports on Hanbury-Brown Twiss measurements of charged kaon and pion pairs from RHIC collisions, revealing non-Gaussian tails and providing new insights into particle emission sources.

Contribution

It presents the first detailed HBT analysis of kaon pairs in Au+Au collisions and preliminary results for pion pairs in p+p collisions, highlighting non-Gaussian features.

Findings

Kaon HBT radii increase linearly with N^{1/3}_{part}.

Significant non-Gaussian tails observed in kaon emission sources.

Pion correlations in p+p are well described by traditional HBT radii extraction.

Abstract

We present Hanbury-Brown Twiss measurements from the PHENIX experiment at RHIC for final results for charged kaon pairs from sqrt{s_{NN}} = 200 GeV Au+Au collisions and preliminary results for charged pion pairs from sqrt{s} = 200 GeV p+p collisions. We find that for kaon pairs from Au+Au, each traditional 3D Gaussian radius shows approximately the same linear increase as a function of N^{1/3}_{part}. An imaging analysis reveals a significant non-Gaussian tail for r \gtrsim 10 fm. The presence of a tail for kaon pairs demonstrates that similar non-Gaussian tails observed in earlier pion measurements cannot be fully explained by decays of long-lived resonances. The preliminary analysis of pions from sqrt{s} = 200 GeV p+p minimum biased collisions show correlations which are well suited to traditional 3D HBT radii extraction via the Bowler-Sinyukov method, and we present R_out, R_side, and R_long as a function of mean transverse pair mass.