Resolving the Hanbury Brown-Twiss Puzzle in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

Two particle correlation data from the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have provided detailed femtoscopic information describing pion emission. In contrast with the success of hydrodynamics in reproducing other classes of observables, these data had avoided description with hydrodynamic-based approaches. This failure has inspired the term HBT puzzle, where HBT refers to femtoscopic studies which were originally based on Hanbury Brown-Twiss interferometry. Here, the puzzle is shown to originate not from a single shortcoming of hydrodynamic models, but the combination of several effects: mainly prethermalized acceleration, using a stiffer equation of state, and adding viscosity.