HBT pion interferometry with phenomenological mean field interaction

TL;DR

This paper investigates how mean field interactions, modeled phenomenologically, distort pion interferometry images in heavy ion collisions, revealing effects on the extracted source size and structure.

Contribution

It introduces a semiclassical model incorporating a complex mean field potential to analyze final state interactions in pion interferometry.

Findings

Mean field interactions can significantly alter HBT radii.

Attractive interactions due to $ ho$ resonance influence source imaging.

Absorptive effects relate to resonance formation and absorption.

Abstract

To extract information on hadron production dynamics in the ultrarelativistic heavy ion collision, the space-time structure of the hadron source has been measured using Hanbury Brown and Twiss interferometry. We study the distortion of the source images due to the effect of a final state interaction. We describe the interaction, taking place during penetrating through a cloud formed by evaporating particles, in terms of a one-body mean field potential localized in the vicinity of the source region. By adopting the semiclassical method, the modification of the propagation of an emitted particle is examined. In analogy to the optical model applied to nuclear reactions, our phenomenological model has an imaginary part of the potential, which describes the absorption in the cloud. In this work, we focus on the pion interferometry and mean field interaction obtained using a phenomenological $\pi\pi$ forward scattering amplitude in the elastic channels. The p-wave scattering with $\rho$ meson resonance leads to an attractive mean field interaction, and the presence of the absorptive part is mainly attributed to the formation of this resonance. We also incorporate a simple time dependence of the potential reflecting the dynamics of the evaporating source. Using the obtained potential, we examine how and to what extent the so-called HBT Gaussian radius is varied by the modification of the propagation.