Resolving the HBT Puzzle in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collision

Abstract

Two particle correlation data from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have provided detailed femtoscopic information describing the space-time structure of the emission of pions. This data had avoided description with hydrodynamic-based approaches, in contrast to the success of hydrodynamics in reproducing other classes of observables. This failure has inspired the term ``HBT puzzle'', where HBT refers to femtoscopic studies which were originally based on Hanbury-Brown Twiss interferometry. Here, the puzzle is shown to originate not from a single shortcoming of hydrodynamic models, but the combination of several effects: mainly including pre-thermalized acceleration, using a stiffer equation of state, and adding viscous corrections.