Pion interferometry studies of relativistic heavy-ion collisions using the intranuclear cascade model

Intranuclear cascade (INC) models have been widely used to understand various features of relativistic heavy-ion collisions. For example, they have had some success in predicting proton, pion, and kaon inclusive cross sections for laboratory bombarding energies in the range 0.4-2.1 GeV/nucleon, and for a variety of projectile-target combinations. Because they are classical models, and the positions and momenta of all particles taking part in the cascade are known as a function of time, they also lend themselves well to understanding the geometric aspects of the collision, such as the size of the interaction region and the duration of particle production. In fact, this is just the kind of information obtained from pion interferometry measurements, where the radius, lifetime, and coherence of the pion source are extracted. Although some theoretical work has been carried out to study the geometry of the pion source with an INC model, no study has yet been made which is directed towards understanding existing pion interferometry measurements. Additional incentives come from recent measurements which have become available for the systems 20Ne + NaF and 40Ar + KCl. Thus, the goal of the present work is to extract radius, lifetime, and coherence parameters from an INC model which can be directly compared with the results of these recent measurements