Pion–kaon femtoscopy and the lifetime of the hadronic phase in Pb−Pb collisions at sNN=2.76 TeV
In this paper, the first femtoscopic analysis of pion–kaon correlations at the LHC is reported. The analysis was performed on the Pb–Pb collision data at sNN=2.76 TeV recorded with the ALICE detector. The non-identical particle correlations probe the spatio-temporal separation between sources of different particle species as well as the average source size of the emitting system. The sizes of the