Accessing the Space-Time Development of Heavy-Ion Collisions With Theory And Experiment

Abstract

This thesis describes two lines of work. The first line is a study of the application of transport theory to massless particles, such as the partons in an ultrarelativistic collision at RHIC. The second line of work is an application of imaging techniques to extract the relative distribution of emission points from two-particle correlation functions measured in heavy-ion reactions. This thesis contains an introduction to transport theory and intensity interferometry as well as updates to several papers. These papers are D.A. Brown and P. Danielewicz, "Partons in Phase-Space," Phys. Rev. D 58 (1998) article no. 094003 (eprint nucl-th/9802015), D.A. Brown and P. Danielewicz, "Imaging of Sources in Heavy-Ion Reactions," Phys. Lett. B 398 (1997) pp. 252-258 (eprint nucl-th/9701010), and D.A. Brown and P. Danielewicz, "Optimized Discretization of Sources Imaged in Heavy-Ion Reactions," Phys. Rev. C 57 (1998) pp. 2474-2483 (eprint nucl-th/9712066).