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Jaroslav Adam, Leszek Adamczyk, Joseph R. Adams, J. Kevin Adkins, Geydar Agakishiev, Madan Mohan Aggarwal, Zubayer Ahammed, N.N. Ajitanand, Igor G. Alekseev, Derek M. Anderson, Ryo Aoyama, Alexey Aparin, Dmitry A. Arkhipkin, Elke Caroline Aschenauer, Muhammad Usman Ashraf, Fareha Atetalla, Anjali Attri, Georgy S. Averichev, Xiaozhi Bai, Vipul Bairathi, Kenneth Barish, Aaron J. Bassill, Arabinda Behera, Rene Bellwied, Anju Bhasin, Ashok Kumar Bhati, Jaroslav Bielčík, Jana Bielčíková, Leslie C. Bland, Igor G. Bordyuzhin, James D. Brandenburg, Andrei V. Brandin, D. Brown, Jason Bryslawskyj, Ivan Bunzarov, Joseph Butterworth, Helen Louise Caines, Manuel Calderón de la Barca Sánchez, J.M. Campbell, Daniel A. Cebra, Irakli Chakaberia, Petr Chaloupka, Z. Chang, F.-H. Chang, N. Chankova-Bunzarova, A. Chatterjee, Subhasis Chattopadhyay, J.H. Chen, X. Chen, X. Chen, J. Cheng, Michael Gerard Cherney, William Christie, Giacomo Contin, Henry J. Crawford, Supriya Das, Tatiana G. Dedovič, Ingo Martin Deppner, Anatoly A. Derevschikov, Lidia Didenko, Christopher Dilks, X. Dong, James Lucus Drachenberg, James C. Dunlop, Leonid G. Efimov, Nicholas Elsey, Jon M. Engelage, Geary Wareham Eppley, Roli Esha, ShinIchi Esumi, Olga Y. Evdokimov, Justin Ewigleben, Kjeld Oleg Eyser, Renee H. Fatemi, Salvatore Fazio, Pavol Federič, P. Federicova, Jan Fedorišin, Peter Filip, Evan Finch, Yuri V. Fisyak, C.E. Flores, Łukasz Fulek, Carl A. Gagliardi, Tetyana Galatyuk, Frank Geurts, Adam Gibson, David P. Grosnick, D.S. Gunarathne, Y. Guo, Anik Gupta, Włodzimierz Guryn, Ayman Hamad, Ahmed M. Hamed, Alena Harlenderova, John W. Harris, L. He, Samuel Heppelmann, Steven Francis Heppelmann, Norbert Herrmann, Andrew S. Hirsch, Lukáš Holub, S. Horvat, Bingchu Huang, X. Huang, Shengli Huang, T. Huang, Huan Zhong Huang, Thomas J. Humanic, P. Huo, George J. Igo, William W. Jacobs, Alexander Jentsch, Jiangyong Jia, K. Jiang, S. Jowzaee, Eleanor G. Judd, Sonia Kabana, Dmitry Kalinkin, K. Kang, David Kapukchyan, Kolja Kauder, Hongwei Ke, Declan Keane, Armen Kechechyan, Daniel P. Kikoła, C. Kim, Todd Adler Kinghorn, Ivan Kisel, Adam Ryszard Kisiel, L. M. Kočenda, Leszek Krzysztof Kosarzewski, A.F. Kraishan, Lukáš Kramárik, L. Krauth, Peter Kravtsov, Keith William Krueger, Nalinda Kulathunga, Shyam Kumar, Lokesh Kumar, Raghav Kunnawalkam Elayavalli, Jakub Kvapil, Joseph H. Kwasizur, Roy Alphanso Lacey, Jeffery M. Landgraf, Jerome Lauret, Alexei Lebedev, Richard Lednicky, J.H. Lee, Y. Li, W. Li, C. Li, Xiaomei Li, Y. Liang, J. Lidrych, T. Lin, Andrzej Lipiec, Michael A. Lisa, H. Liu, P. Liu, F. Liu, Y. Liu, Tonko A. Ljubicic, William Joseph Llope, Michael Lomnitz, Ronald S. Longacre, S. Luo, X. Luo, L. Ma, G.L. Ma, R. Ma, Yu-Gang Ma, Niseem Magdy Abdelwahab Abdelrahman, Richard Daniel Majka, Dukhishyam Mallick, Spyridon Margetis, Christina Markert, Howard S. Matis, Oliver Matonoha, D. Mayes, Joel Anthony Mazer, Kathryn Meehan, Jincheng Mei, Nikolai G. Minaev, Saskia Mioduszewski, Debadeepti Mishra, Bedangadas Mohanty, Mriganka Mouli Mouli, Isaac A. Mooney, Dmitry A. Morozov, Md. Nasim, J.D. Negrete, John M. Nelson, Daniel B. Nemes, Maowu Nie, Grigory A. Nigmatkulov, Takafumi Niida, Larisa V. Nogach, Toshihiro Nonaka, Sandibek B. Nurušev, Grazyna Janina Odyniec, Akio Ogawa, Saehanseul Oh, Kunsu Oh, Vitaly A. Okorokov, D. Olvitt, Brian S. Page, Robert Pak, Yuri Panebratsev, Bogdan Pawlik, Hua Pei, Chris Perkins, Jan Marian Pluta, Jeffrey Brent Porter, Matthew Posik, Navneet Kumar Pruthi, Mariusz Przybycien, Jörn H. Putschke, Amilkar Quintero, Sooraj Krishnan Radhakrishnan, Suvarna Ramachandran, Robert L. Ray, Rosi Jan Reed, Hans Georg Ritter, Jabus B. Roberts, Oleg V. Rogačevskij, Juan L. Romero, Lijuan Ruan, Jan Rusnak, Olga Rusnakova, Nihar Ranjan Sahoo, Pradip Kumar Sahu, Sevil Salur, Jack H. Sandweiss, Joachim Schambach, Alexander Schmah, William B. Schmidke, Norbert Schmitz, Benjamin R. Schweid, Florian Seck, Janet Elizabeth Seger, Maria Sergeeva, Richard Seto, Peter Seyboth, N. Shah, Ehtiram Shahaliev, Prashanth V. Shanmuganathan, M. Shao, W.Q. Shen, F. Shen, Shusu Shi, Q.Y. Shou, Ernst P. Sichtermann, Sebastian Siejka, Rafał Sikora, Miroslav Šimko, Subhash Singha, Dmitri V. Smirnov, Nikolai Smirnov, William Solyst, Paul Richard Sorensen, Harold. M. Spinka, Brijesh Kumar Srivastava, T. D. Shirvel Stanislaus, David J. Stewart, Michail Nikolaevič Strichanov, Blair Stringfellow, Alexandre Alarcon do Passo Suaide, Tetsuro Sugiura, Michal Šumbera, Branden Summa, X. Sun, Y. Sun, X.M. Sun, Bernd Surrow, Dmitry N. Svirida, Paweł Szymański, Zebo Tang, Aihong Tang, Arkadiy Taranenko, Terence J. Tarnowsky, James H. Thomas, Anthony Robert Timmins, David Tlusty, Takahito Todoroki, Mikhail V. Tokarev, Catherine A. Tomkiel, Stephen Trentalange, Robert E. Tribble, Prithwish Tribedy, Srikanta Kumar Tripathy, Oleg D. Tsai, B. Tu, Thomas Ullrich, David G. Underwood, Isaac Upsal, Gene Van Buren, Jan Vanek, Alexander Nikolaevich Vasiliev, Iouri Vassiliev, Flemming Videbæk, Stanislav Vokal, Sergei Voloshin, A. Vossen, F. Wang, G. Wang, Y. Wang, Y. Wang, Jason C. Webb, L. Wen, Gary D. Westfall, Howard Wieman, Scott W. Wissink, Richard Witt, Y. Wu, Z.G. Xiao, W. Xie, Guannan Xie, Z. Xu, J. Xu, Y.F. Xu, N. Xu, Qinghua Xu, Y. Yang, C. Yang, S. Yang, Q. Yang, Z. Ye, Z. Ye, L. Yi, K. Yip, In-Kwon Yoo, N. Yu, Hanna Paulina Zbroszczyk, Wangmei Zha, Zuman Zhang, J. Zhang, L. Zhang, J. Zhang, Y. Zhang, X.P. Zhang, S. Zhang, S. Zhang, J. Zhao, C. Zhong, C. Zhou, L. Zhou, Z. Zhu, X. Zhu, Maksym Zyzak

• We present the first measurement of the proton–Ω correlation function in heavy-ion collisions for the central (0–40%) and peripheral (40–80%) Au + Au collisions at √sNN = 200 GeV by the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC). Predictions for the ratio of peripheral collisions to central collisions for the proton–Ω correlation function are sensitive to the presence of a nucleon– bound state. These predictions are based on the proton– interaction extracted from (2 + 1)-flavor lattice QCD calculations at the physical point. The measured ratio of the proton–Ω correlation function between the peripheral (small system) and central (large system) collisions is less than unity for relative momentum smaller than 40 MeV/c. Comparison of our measured correlation ratio with theoretical calculation slightly favors a proton– bound system with a binding energy of ∼ 27 MeV.