STATISTICAL CORRELATIONS IN RELATIVISTIC HEAVY ION COLLISIONS By

In order to understand the state of matter produced in relativistic heavy ion collisions, it is crucial to understand the space-time characteristics of the emitting source. Whereas the momenta of particles can be directly measured, space-time information can only be inferred from two-particle correlation observables. In this thesis, two different kind of correlation observables will be discussed: Part I will investigate the two-particle correlation function for non-identical particles. It will be shown that the correlator is affected by Coulomb and strong final-state interactions in a way which allows extracting the size and lifetime of the source. Part II will discuss the modeling of particle multiplicities for charge balance functions. The thermal model of a canonical ensemble under charge conservation constraints will be used to generate particle multiplicities at various temperatures. A highly optimized algo-rithm will be developed for calculating the partition functions iteratively. Balance functions obtained using this thermal model and the blast-wave description will be compared to ex-perimental data, and good agreement will be seen. To my parent