Imaging proton sources and space-momentum correlations

Abstract

The reliable extraction of information from two-proton correlation functions is a long-standing problem in two-particle interferometry. Recently introduced imaging techniques give one the ability to reconstruct source functions from the correlation data in a model independent way. We explore the applicability of two-proton imaging to realistic sources with transverse space-momentum correlations. We find that the proton images are very sensitive to these correlations. We show that one can reliably reconstruct the source functions from the two-proton correlation functions, regardless of the degree of the space-momentum correlations.