Potentials and Limits of Bose-einstein Interferometry

We complete the introduction of Yano-Koonin-Podgoretskĭı (YKP) parametrization of the correlation function by deriving the corrections to the correlation radii which arise from releasing the popular smoothness approximation and approximation of setting the pair momentum on-shell. We investigate the definition range of this parametrization and find kinematic regions in which the YKP parametrization is inapplicable. These problems disappear if the newly proposed Modified Yano-Koonin-Podgoretskĭı parametrization is used. We then focus on the physical interpretation of the correlation radii obtained in the different parametrizations. While the extraction of the longitudinal source expansion from the YK rapidity is found to be rather robust against variations of the source density profiles, the extracted emission duration is quite sensitive to such variations and cannot be reliably extracted except for the case of extremely long source lifetimes.