Transverse radial expansion in nuclear collisions and two particle correlations

Abstract

At the very first stage of an ultra-relativistic nucleus-nucleus collision new particles are produced in individual nucleon-nucleon collisions. In the transverse plane, all particles from a single $NN$ collision are initially located at the same position. The subsequent thermalization and transverse radial expansion of the system create strong position-momentum correlations and lead to characteristic rapidity, transverse momentum, and azimuthal correlations among the produced particles.

Comments: As accepted for publication in Phys. Lett. B. The discussion is slightly extended. The linear scale in Fig.2 changed to log scale. No other changes