Eur. Phys. J. A (2010) 45: 91-97
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2010-10984-0

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Rapidity correlations of protons from a fragmented fireball

¹ FNSPE, Czech Technical University in Prague, 11519, Prague, Czech Republic
² Univerzita Mateja Bela, 97401, Banská Bystrica, Slovakia

Received: 1 February 2010
Revised: 31 March 2010
Accepted: 7 May 2010
Published online: 5 June 2010

Abstract

We investigate proton rapidity correlations for a fireball that fragments due to non-equilibrium effects at the phase transition from the deconfined to the hadronic phase. Such effects include spinodal fragmentation in the case of a first-order phase transition at lower collision energies and cavitation due to the sudden rise of the bulk viscosity at the crossover probed at RHIC and at the LHC. Our study is performed on samples of Monte Carlo events. The correlation function in relative rapidity appears to be a sensitive probe of fragmentation. We show that resonance decays make the strength of the correlation even stronger.