Three-pion Hanbury Brown-Twiss correlations in relativistic heavy-ion collisions from the STAR experiment

Phys Rev Lett. 2003 Dec 31;91(26 Pt 1):262301. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.91.262301. Epub 2003 Dec 24.

Abstract

Data from the first physics run at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Au+Au collisions at sqrt[s(NN)]=130 GeV, have been analyzed by the STAR Collaboration using three-pion correlations with charged pions to study whether pions are emitted independently at freeze-out. We have made a high-statistics measurement of the three-pion correlation function and calculated the normalized three-particle correlator to obtain a quantitative measurement of the degree of chaoticity of the pion source. It is found that the degree of chaoticity seems to increase with increasing particle multiplicity.