The width and height of interferometry

The Hanbury-Brown Twiss effect in high-energy, heavy-ion collisions is discussed as an interference phenomenon, in terms of the quantum mechanical wave functions representing the particles produced after a reaction. We look into how these wave functions are detected by means of high-energy particle detectors and establish the conditions for the occurrence of interference. We introduce a simple analytical model to illustrate the consequences of this formulation in the computation of the two-particle correlation function and show that the scale parameter in the correlation function contains information on the size and coherence lengths as well as on the spectrum produced by the source. We also discuss the effect of multiple scattering during the detection process in the measured particle correlation properties