Speaker
Description
The critical questions posed by the 2023 Nuclear Science Long Range Plan include "how are the various hadrons produced in a single scattering process correlated to one another", and "how does hadronization change in a dense partonic environment?".
The results we present in this talk on azimuthal correlations in $\pi^+\pi^-$ and $\pi^+p$ pairs measured by the CLAS collaboration at Jefferson Lab seek to answer both of these questions. We find that the measured correlation functions peak at $\Delta\phi=\pi$ and that this peak is wider for heavier nuclei than for deuterium. We will also give predictions for similar planned measurements in a follow-up experiment with the upgraded CLAS12 detector setup, which features a higher beam energy, higher luminosity, beam polarization (which was absent in the previous measurement), and improvements in particle identification.
