Relative Space-Time Asymmetries in Pion and Nucleon Production in Noncentral Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions at High Energies

We propose the use of ratios of the pion-proton correlation functions evaluated under different conditions to study the relative space-time asymmetries in pion and proton emission (pion and nucleon source relative shifts) in high energy heavy ion collisions. We address the question of the noncentral collisions, where the sources can be shifted spatially relative to each other both in the longitudinal and in the transverse directions in the reaction plane. We use the RQMD event generator to illustrate the effect and the technique. copyright 1997 The American Physical Society