Probing transport theories via two-proton source imaging

The imaging technique is applied to two-proton correlation functions to extract quantitative information about the space-time properties of the emitting source and about the fraction of protons which can be attributed to fast emission mechanisms. These new analysis techniques resolve important ambiguities that bedeviled prior comparisons between measured correlation functions and those calculated by transport theory. Quantitative comparisons to transport theory are presented here. The results of the present analysis differ from those reported previously for the same reaction systems. The shapes of the two-proton emitting sources are strongly sensitive to the details about the in-medium nucleon-nucleon cross sections and their density dependence.