Back-to-back correlations in finite expanding systems

Abstract

Back-to-Back Correlations (BBC) of particle-antiparticle pairs are predicted to appear if hot and dense hadronic matter is formed in high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions. The BBC are related to in-medium mass-modification and squeezing of the quanta involved. Although the suppression of finite emission times were already known, the effects of finite system sizes and of collective phenomena had not been studied yet. Thus, for testing the survival and magnitude of the effect in more realistic situations, we study the BBC when mass-modification occurs in a finite sized, thermalized medium, considering a non-relativistically expanding fireball with finite emission time, and evaluating the width of the back-to-back correlation function. We show that the BBC signal indeed survives the expansion and flow effects, with sufficient magnitude to be observed at RHIC.