title: Photon interferometry of Au+Au collisions at the BNL Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider.
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708-0305, USA.
authors.forename: Steffen A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Bass
authors.forename: Berndt
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Müller
authors.forename: Dinesh K
authors.initials: DK
authors.lastname: Srivastava