Kaon femtoscopy at the STAR experiment

(2017) Hot Quarks 2016: Workshop for Young Scientists on the Physics of Ultrarelativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions (HQ2016) — Location: South Padre Island, Texas (12.September.2016)

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Abstract
The properties of the quark-gluon plasma have been extensively studied in high-energy nuclear collisions at RHIC. Femtoscopic measurements of two-particle correlations at small relative momenta reveal the space-time characteristics of the system at the moment of particle emission. In comparison to analyses using the most abundant pions, like-sign kaons provide a cleaner probe of the emission source as they less frequently result from resonance weak decays. Additionally, kaons contain strange quarks so these measurements can be sensitive to different effects and earlier collision stages. Pairs of like-sign kaons exhibit correlations due to Coulomb interactions and Bose-Einstein quantum statistics. The system of unlike-sign kaons contains a narrow φ(1020) resonance in the final state. Femtoscopic measurements have been predicted to be particularly sensitive to the source size and momentum-space correlations in the region of this resonance.In this proceedings, we present the STAR preliminary results on the like-sign and unlike-sign kaon femtoscopic correlation functions in 200 GeV Au+Au collisions at RHIC. Collision centrality and the transverse pair momentum k(T) dependence of the radius parameters will be discussed. The results from unlike-sign kaon correlation functions will be compared with model predictions.
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Lidrych, J. (2017). Kaon femtoscopy at the STAR experiment. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 832(1), 12059. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/832/1/012059 (Original work published 2017)