Quantum Mechanical Localization Effects for Bose-Einstein Correlations

Abstract

For a set of N identical massive boson wavepackets with optimal initial quantum mechanical localization, we calculate the Hanbury-Brown/Twiss (HBT) two-particle correlation function. Our result provides an algorithm for calculating one-particle spectra and two-particle correlations from an arbitrary phase space occupation (q_i,p_i,t_i)_{i=1,N} as e.g. returned by event generators. It is a microscopic derivation of the result of the coherent state formalism, providing explicit finite multiplicity corrections. Both the one- and two-particle spectra depend explicitly on the initial spatial wavepacket width which parametrizes the quantum mechanical wavepacket localization. They provide upper and lower bounds which suggest that a realistic value for this width has the order of the Compton wavelength.