HBT Shape Analysis with strongqstrong-Cumulants.pdfVIP

Brazilian Journal of Physics, vol. 37, no. 3A, September, 2007 877 HBT Shape Analysis with q-Cumulants H. C. Eggers1 and P. Lipa2 1 Department of Physics, University of Stellenbosch, 7602 Stellenbosch, South Africa 2 Arizona Research Laboratories, Division of Neural Systems, Memory and Ageing, University of Arizona, Tucson AZ 85724, USA. Received on 25 November, 2006 Taking up and extending earlier suggestions, we show how two- and three-dimensional shapes of second- order HBT correlations can be described in a multivariate Edgeworth expansion around Gaussian ellipsoids, with expansion coefficients, identified as the cumulants of pair momentum difference q, acting as shape parameters. Off-diagonal terms dominate both the character and magnitude of shapes. Cumulants can be measured directly and so the shape analysis has no need for fitting. Keywords: Particle correlations; Intensity interferometry I. INTRODUCTION worth form with Poissonian reference f 0 to describe multi- plicity distributions [11], the shape analysis of R2 requires the Early measurements of the Hanbury-Brown Twiss (HBT) more traditional continuous version [12] with a Gaussian ref- effect made use of momentum differences in one dimension, erence f 0 . For the purpose of analysing the shape of the ex- for example the four-momentum difference qinv [1]. The perimental co