Rapidity dependence of proton cumulants and correlation functions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how proton cumulants and correlation functions depend on rapidity and transverse momentum, finding preliminary data consistent with independence but suggesting possible moderate rapidity dependence, and proposes further measurements.

Contribution

It introduces an analysis of rapidity dependence of proton correlation functions and proposes a new method to explore this dependence through rapidity window variation.

Findings

Preliminary data are consistent with rapidity-independent correlation functions.

Moderate increase in rapidity correlations with separation is slightly favored.

A new measurement approach is proposed for future studies.

Abstract

The dependence of multi-proton correlation functions and cumulants on the acceptance in rapidity and transverse momentum is studied. We find that the preliminary data of various cumulant ratios are consistent, within errors, with rapidity and transverse momentum independent correlation functions. However, rapidity correlations which moderately increase with rapidity separation between protons are slightly favored. We propose to further explore the rapidity dependence of multi-particle correlation functions by measuring the dependence of the integrated reduced correlation functions as a function of the size of the rapidity window.