Multi-boson effects and the normalization of the two-pion correlation function

Abstract

The two-pion correlation function can be defined as a ratio of either the measured momentum distributions or the normalized momentum space probabilities. We show that the first alternative avoids certain ambiguities since then the normalization of the two-pion correlator contains important information on the multiplicity distribution of the event ensemble which is lost in the second alternative. We illustrate this explicitly for specific classes of event ensembles.