Speaker
Description
Recent ALICE results have demonstrated that femtoscopic measurements in pp and p-Pb collisions provide an unprecedented opportunity to study the short range part of the strong interaction.
Femtoscopy is a technique to extract information on the emission source and interaction potential from correlations between particles with low relative momentum. In this talk we will use femtoscopy to study the $p-\Lambda$ and $p-\Sigma^0$ interactions on the scale of the particle emitting source, which is 1 fm or smaller.
Existing data on the $p-\Lambda$ interaction from scattering experiments only probe large energies, and are not sensitive to the opening of the $N-\Sigma$ channel. In this talk we will show that ALICE data from high-multiplicity pp collisions allows us to measure the $p-\Lambda$ correlation function with exceptional precision at low momentum and at the $N-\Sigma$ threshold, and are thus capable of providing quantitative constraints to existing theoretical models, such as chiral effective theory calculations.
Furthermore, no $p-\Sigma^0$ scattering data exist, and as a result the theoretical models are poorly constrained. The ALICE data allow us to perform the first ever measurement of the $p-\Sigma^0$ correlation function and make comparisons to state-of-the-art theoretical models.
