Particle Correlations with Heavy Ions at LHC Energies

The ALICE detector will offer very good conditions to study the space-time characteristics of particle production in heavy-ion collisions at LHC from measurements of the correlation function of identical and non-identical particles at small relative velocities. The correlations - induced by Coulomb and nuclear final-state interactions - of non-identical particles appear to be directly sensitive to the space-time asymmetries of particle production allowing, in particular, a measurement of the mean relative delays in particle emission at time scales as small as few fm/c. The problem of Coulomb interaction of the correlated particles is particularly important in the case of the large effective volumes formed in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion reactions.