Measurement of source chaoticity for particle emission in Au+Au collisions at image using 3-particle HBT correlations Original Research Article

Data from the first physics run at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory from the STAR experiment have been analyzed using three-pion correlations to study whether pions are emitted independently at freezeout. We have made a high-statistics measurement of the three-pion correlation function and calculated the normalized three-particle correlator to obtain a quantitative measurement of the degree of chaoticity in the freeze-out environment.