Pion interferometry at 200 GeV using anisotropic hydrodynamics

Abstract: In this paper, we continue our phenomenological studies of heavy-ion collisions using 3+1d anisotropic hydrodynamics (aHydro). In previous works, we compared quasiparticle aHydro (aHydroQP) with ALICE 2.76 TeV Pb-Pb and RHIC 200 GeV Au-Au collision results. At both energies, the agreement was quite good between aHydroQP and the experimental data for many observables. In this work, we present comparisons of the Hanbury Brown--Twiss (HBT) radii and their ratios determined using pi+ pi+ pairs produced in 200 GeV Au-Au collisions. We first present comparisons with STAR results for the HBT radii and their ratios. We then present comparisons with PHENIX results for the HBT radii and their ratios. In both cases, we find reasonable agreement between aHydroQP predictions and available experimental results for the ratios of HBT radii. At the level of the radii themselves, in some cases quantitative differences on the order of 10-20% remain, which deserve further study.