Imaging proton sources and space-momentum correlations

The reliable extraction of information from the two-proton correlation functions measured in heavy-ion reactions is a long-standing problem. Recently introduced imaging techniques give one the ability to reconstruct source functions from the correlation data in a model independent way. We explore the applicability of two-proton imaging to realistic sources with varying degrees of transverse space-momentum correlations. By fixing the freeze-out spatial distribution, we find that both the proton images and the two-particle correlation functions are very sensitive to these correlations. We show that one can reliably reconstruct the source functions from the two-proton correlation functions, regardless of the degree of the space-momentum correlations.