Exploring the Big Bang with femtoscopy

Abstract

Exploring the fundamental constituents of the matter around us and in the Universe, as well as their interactions, is among the premier goals of physics. Investigating ultrarelativistic collisions in particle accelerators has delivered answers to these questions many times in the past decades. In this paper we focus on the research aimed at recreating the matter that filled the Universe in the first microsecond after the Big Bang -- but this time in collisions of heavy ions. In particular we discuss the technique called femtoscopy, which provides us a tool to understand the space-time structure of particle creation in heavy-ion collisions. We utilize Levy-stable distributions to investigate this structure and explore its dependence on particle momentum and collision energy.