Neutral Kaon Femtoscopy in Pb-Pb Collisions at √sNN = 2.76 TeV at the LHC with ALICE

Femtoscopy is an experimental method used to study the spatio-temporal characteristics of the particle-emitting "sources'' of ultra-relativistic particle collisions. This method allows us to measure the size, shape, and lifetime of the kinetic freeze-out region of the particles created in the collisions as they are emitted from the expanding system. Studying these source regions allows us to investigate the dynamics of the system as it evolves from the hot, dense state of matter known as the Quark-Gluon Plasma into a dilute, free-streaming hadronic gas. The analysis of the extracted femtoscopic radii and their dependences on event centrality, momentum, and particle species can help put constaints on unknown quantities used in theoretical models such as time-scales and particle-particle scattering parameters. The femtoscopic tool is the two-particle relative momentum correlation function, which connects the final-state momentum distributions measured by the detector to the space-time distributions of particle emission, which are on the order of 10$_{-15}$ m, or femtometers, and cannot be directly measured. These correlations are sensitive to the quantum statistics of identical particles as well as the strong and/or Coulomb interactions between particles. Neutral kaon femtoscopy acts as an excellent complement to similar analyses of other particle species. Kaon analyses are generally able to reach higher values of transverse momentum (K$_{T}$) and transverse mass (M$_{T}$ = √K$\frac{2}{T}$+m$^{2}$) than the more commonly studied pion analyses. The comparison of kaon radii with those of pions and protons allows us to check for universal M$_{T}$-scaling, which is predicted by some hydrodynamic models. The study of neutral kaons also acts as a convenient consistency check for the charged kaon analysis, as both analyses are expected to produce similar results while employing significantly different analysis methods, e.g. directly measured tracks vs. decay vertex reconstruction and Coulomb-dominated vs. strong-dominated final-state interactions. This thesis will present K$\frac{0}{S}$K$\frac{0}{S}$ femtoscopic correlations in Pb-Pb collisions at √sNN = 2.76 TeV at the LHC with ALICE. This analysis will be the first centrality- and K$_{T}$-differential study of K$\frac{0}{S}$K$\frac{0}{S}$ correlations in heavy-ion collisions, presenting femtoscopic results for three centrality bins and four K$_{T}$ bins. This thesis will present results for both one-dimensional and three-dimensional femtoscopic analyses, the latter being the first of its kind for the K$\frac{0}{S}$K$\frac{0}{S}$ system.