Source Function Determined from Hanbury-Brown/Twiss (HBT)Correlations by the Maximum Entropy Principle

We study the reconstruction of the source function in space-time directly from the measured Hanbury-Brown/Twiss (HBT) correlation function using the maximum entropy principle. We find that the problem is ill-defined without at least one additional theoretical constraint as input. Using the requirement of a finite source lifetime for the problem we find a new Gaussian parametrization of the source function directly in terms of the measured HBT radius parameters and its lifetime, where the latter is a free parameter which is not directly measurable by HBT. We discuss the implications of our results for the remaining freedom in building source models consistent with a given set of measured HBT radius parameters.