Estimating the Parameters of Bose-Einstein Correlations from the Two-Particle Correlation Function in Multihadronic Final States

To estimate the strength of the Bose-Einstein correlations and the radius of the hadronization region in multiparticle production, the two-particle correlation functions $R$ for identical pairs is adjusted to a parametric function describing the enhancement at small momentum differences. This is usually done by means of a binned uncorrelated least squares fit. This article demonstrates that this procedure underestimates the statistical errors. A recipe is given to construct from the data the covariance matrix To estimate the strength of the Bose-Einstein correlations and the radius of the hadronization region in multiparticle production, the two-particle correlation functions $R$ for identical pairs is adjusted to a parametric function describing the enhancement at small momentum differences. This is usually done by means of a binned uncorrelated least squares fit. This article demonstrates that this procedure underestimates the statistical errors. A recipe is given to construct from the data the covariance matrix between the bins of the histogram of the two-particle correlation function.