Speaker
Description
Exploring the space-time extent of particle production is an important goal of heavy-ion physics, and substantial effort has been made in order to understand the underlying physics behind the experimental observations of non-Gaussian behavior, in particular with respect to connections to the phase diagram. In experiments, femtoscopic (momentum) correlations are utilized to gain information about the space-time geometry of the particle emitting source. The correlation functions are characterized by the Lévy exponent alpha and the Lévy scale R, as well as correlation strength lambda. The transverse mass dependence of these parameters was recently explored from SPS through RHIC to LHC. In this talk an overview of these results is presented, with implications on the origins of non-Gaussian behavior, particle production mechanisms, as well as possible searches for the critical point.
