Probing the QCD phase diagram with HBT femtoscopy

Abstract

Intensity interferometry originates from the field of radio astronomy on the trace of Robert Hanbury Brown and Richard Quincy Twiss. In high energy physics, the phenomena was discovered by Goldhaber, Goldhaber, Lee and Pais. In radio astronomy the method is exceeded by more modern approaches but in high energy physics, the measurements of Hanbury Brown-Twiss (HBT) or Goldhaber-Goldhaber-Lee-Pais (GGLP) type of correlations are important tools to access the spatio-temporal properties of the matter under extreme conditions on subatomic scales. In this paper, I review recent experimental results from energies of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and discuss their possible implication on the equation of state of the QCD matter.