Point Processes and the Analysis of Collision Data

Heavy ion collisions have been investigated since the 1960's. The current series of experiments at the RHIC facility at Brookhaven began in 2000. Each pair of colliding nuclei will yield from several hundred to over 1000 particles, and a typical experimental run will involve tens of thousands of collisions. The current generation of detectors identifies and measures the momentum of the majority of the charged particles emitted in a collision. It is natural to regard the observed particles in a single collision as a point process, and a series of collisions as an independent (but not identically distributed) sample from that process.