Studies of final state interactions via femtoscopy in ALICE

TL;DR

This paper presents preliminary femtoscopic measurements of particle correlations in heavy-ion collisions, focusing on final-state interactions and their potential to constrain interaction parameters, with implications for understanding baryon interactions.

Contribution

First measurements of K0SK± correlation functions in Pb-Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV, using femtoscopy to study final-state interactions and constrain resonance parameters.

Findings

Correlation functions indicate interactions via the a0(980) resonance.

Baryon-baryon and baryon-antibaryon correlations analyzed.

Method demonstrated for constraining unknown baryon interaction cross-sections.

Abstract

Femtoscopy is a technique enabling measurements of the space-time characteristics of particle-emitting sources. However, the femtoscopic analysis is also sensitive to the interaction cross-section. In this paper we show the first preliminary measurements of $\rm K^0_SK^{\pm}$ correlation functions in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=5.02$ TeV. These correlations originate from the final-state interactions which proceed through the $a_0(980)$ resonance only and can be employed to constrain its parameters. A similar approach can be applied to baryon pairs to extract the unknown interaction cross-sections for some (anti-)baryon-(anti-)baryon pairs. We show baryon--baryon and baryon--anti-baryon correlation functions of protons and lambdas, as well as discuss shortly the fitting method.