Probing granular inhomogeneity of a particle-emitting source by imaging two-pion Bose–Einstein correlations

Abstract

Using the source imaging technique in two-pion interferometry, we study the image of the hydrodynamic particle-emitting source with the HIJING initial conditions for relativistic heavy-ion collisions on an event-by-event basis. It is shown that the initial-state fluctuations may give rise to bumpy structures of the medium during hydrodynamical evolution, which affects the two-pion emission space and leads to a visible two-tiered shape in the source function imaged using the two-pion Bose–Einstein correlations. This two-tiered shape can be understood within a similar but more analytic granular source model and is found to be closely related to the introduced quantity $$\xi$$ , which characterizes the granular inhomogeneity of the source. By fitting the imaged source function with a granular source parametrization, we extract the granular inhomogeneity of the hydrodynamic source, which is found to be sensitive to both the Gaussian smearing width of the HIJING initial condition and the centrality of the collisions.