Genuine pion–pion correlations in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

The search for genuine two-particle dynamical correlations among the pions produced in 16O–AgBr interactions at 60 AGeV and 32S–AgBr interactions at 200 AGeV (super proton synchrotron data) has been carried out by the method of normalized factorial cumulant moments in pseudo-rapidity (η), azimuthal angle (ϕ) and two-dimensional anisotropic (η–ϕ) phase space. The analysis reveals the presence of genuine two-particle dynamical correlations among the pions in 16O–AgBr and 32S–AgBr interactions in both one and two dimensions. Stronger correlation has been observed in higher dimensional space. Correlations between the pions are found to decrease with the increase of projectile mass and energy. Experimental results have been compared with the FRITIOF data sample in the pseudo-rapidity space. In azimuthal angle space, events simulated by generating random numbers (Monte Carlo Simulation) have been used for the purpose of comparison. The FRITIOF data and the data of the simulated interactions have failed to reproduce the experimental results. The experimental results have also been compared with the event sample generated by the UrQMD model in both pseudo-rapidity and azimuthal angle space. Like the FRITIOF model, the UrQMD model is also unable to replicate the experimental results. The variation of normalized cumulant moment (K2) against the number of bin M has been fitted with a function K2 = aMb in both one and two dimensions. No fitting of this kind has been possible in the case of the FRITIOF data, UrQMD data and the MC simulated data.