Two-particle correlations of identified particles in heavy ion collisions at STAR

Abstract

The study of quarks and their interactions through gluons has been an active area of research since their discovery. For two decades the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory has been dedicated to studying the interactions between quarks by producing nuclear matter in an extremely dense and hot environment. It has been hypothesized that colliding beams of atomic nuclei near the speed of light creates the hot and dense environment in which all quarks in the nuclei de-confine to form a short-lived state of matter called a Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). Because of the short lifetime of QGP, it is impossible to observe it directly and, the only way to study such matter is through the final state particles. Two-particle correlation, which is defined using Pearson's normalized covariance, is one of the techniques to study the early interactions via the final state particles. A broad survey has been made to study the two-particle correlations of identified-charged hadrons (pi, K and p) in various ranges of momentum for the hadrons produced in √sNN=200 GeV Au+Au collisions at the STAR experiment at RHIC. A total of 2123 two-dimensional independent structures made by correlation coefficients in relative angular space in (eta, phi) for different combinations of identified hadrons have been studied. Correlations between any two identified particles contrasts to all-particle correlations giving an opportunity to study the contribution of each particle species in the hadronization processes. As a new feature, same-side anti-correlations are observed in both like-sign and unlike-sign pairs in certain yT bins and in certain identified particles. A significant feature of the final state distribution of particles is an azimuthal anisotropy which is defined as the second Fourier component; the amplitude is proportional to parameter v2. We report the measure of azimuthal anisotropy of identified hadrons for the first time and test for the factorization used in conventional analysis. The data presented here constitute a comprehensive measurement of the light-flavor, di-hadron density as function of collision centrality, transverse momentum and 2D relative angles in longitudinal (beam direction) and azimuthal directions.