Distortion of the HBT images by meson clouds

Abstract

We study the effects of mesonic final state interactions on the Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) intensity interferometry for mesons in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. Modification of the one-body amplitude of emitted mesons while going through a cloud of other mesons is estimated in the semiclassical approximation with a mesonic optical potential which incorporates both coherent forward scattering with other mesons and the absorption due to the incoherent scattering in the meson clouds. We show how these effects results in the distortion of the HBT images.