Charged Kaon Femtoscopy in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions: Correlation Formalism and Analysis Framework

This paper presents a complete methodological framework for charged kaon femtoscopy in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Two-particle correlation techniques are used to extract femtometer-scale space–time information about the particle-emitting source formed in quark–gluon plasma. Charged kaons provide a particularly clean probe of freeze-out geometry due to reduced resonance feed-down relative to pions. The work develops the correlation formalism, Bertsch–Pratt parameterization in the longitudinally comoving system, Coulomb corrections using the Bowler–Sinyukov method, and a full analysis pipeline. A synthetic data demonstration is included to validate the fitting and extraction framework in a fully reproducible manner. This work is designed to serve as a standalone, citable reference for charged kaon femtoscopy analyses in relativistic heavy-ion experiments.