Continuous emission versus freeze-out via HBT

The effect of the continuous emission hypothesis on the two-pion Bose-Einstein correlation function is discussed and compared with the corresponding results based on the usual freeze-out. Sizeable differences in the correlation function appear in these different descriptions of the decoupling process. This means that, when extracting properties of the hot matter formed in high-energy heavy-ion collisions from the data, completely different conclusions may be reached according to the description of the particle emission process adopted.