Viewing the liquid-gas phase transition by measuring proton correlations

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Abstract
A formalism is developed for predicting two-particle correlations in terms of the final single-particle phase-space distributions which can be calculated from theoretical models. The ability to determine the phase-space distributions from experiment is discussed. It is shown that evaporation which characterizes the liquid phase and expansion which characterizes the gaseous phase have clear experimental signatures. An abrupt change in the behavior of the experimentally inferred lifetime is predicted near the threshold for the liquid-gas phase transition.