Detailed analysis of two-particle correlations in central Pb - Au collisions at 158 GeV per nucleon

This thesis presents a two-particle correlation analysis of the fully calibrated high statistics CERES Pb+Au collision data at the top SPS energy, with the emphasis on the pion-proton correlations and the event-plane dependence of the correlation radii. CERES is a dilepton spectrometer at CERN SPS. After the upgrade, which improved the momentum resolution and extended the detector capabilities to hadrons, CERES collected 30 million Pb+Au events at 158 AGeV in the year 2000. A previous Hanbury-Brown-Twiss (HBT) analysis of pion pairs in a subset of these data, together with the results obtained at other beam energies, lead to a new freeze-out criterion [AAA+03]. In this work, the detailed transverse momentum and event-plane dependence of the pion correlation radii, as well as the pion-proton correlations, are discussed in the framework of the blast wave model of the expanding fireball. Furthermore, development of an electron drift velocity gas monitor for the ALICE TPC sub-detector is presented. The new method of the gas composition monitoring is based on the simultaneous measurement of the electron drift velocity and the gas gain and is sensitive to even small variations of the gas mixture composition. Several modifications of the apparatus were performed resulting in the final drift velocity resolution of 0.3 permille. Zusammenfassung