HBT Studies with E917 at the AGS: A Status Report

Abstract

Two-particle correlations between pions in Au+Au collisions have been measured at beam kinetic energies of 6, 8, and 10.8 GeV/u at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) over a wide range of rapidities using a magnetic spectrometer. The data have been analyzed in the Hanbury-Brown and Twiss (HBT) framework to extract source parameters. The event-by-event orientation of the reaction plane has also been measured using a scintillator hodoscope at far forward rapidities, and beam vertexing detectors upstream of the target. A preliminary analysis of the dependence of the source parameters on the reaction plane is presented.