Timescale of Particle Emission Using Nuclear Interferometry

Thirty years ago, Goldhaber1, et al. discovered that pairs of identical pions produced by a proton-antiproton interaction showed a higher probability for close emission than pairs of opposite charge. The GGLP effect was later interpreted as a manifestation of Bose-Einstein statistics, which allows a determination of space-time characteristics of the emission source by interferometry procedure. This method has been applied in numerous studies of meson correlations with a large variety of energies up to ultra-relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions.