Photon interferometry of Au+Au collisions at the BNL Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider

Phys Rev Lett. 2004 Oct 15;93(16):162301. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.93.162301. Epub 2004 Oct 13.

Abstract

We calculate the two-body correlation function of direct photons produced in central Au+Au collisions at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider. Our calculation includes contributions from the early preequilibrium phase in which photons are produced via hard parton scatterings as well as radiation of photons from a thermalized quark-gluon plasma and the subsequent expanding hadron gas. We find that high energy photon interferometry provides a faithful probe of the details of the space-time evolution and of the early reaction stages of the system.