A method allowing analysis of the overpopulation of phase space in heavy ion collisions in a model-independent way is proposed within the hydrodynamic approach. It makes it possible to extract a chemical potential of thermal pions at freeze-out, irrespective of the form of freeze-out (isothermal) hypersurface in Minkowski space and transverse flows on it. The contributions of resonance (with masses up to $2\mathrm{GeV}$) decays to spectra, interferometry volumes, and phase-space densities are calculated and discussed in detail. The estimates of average phase-space densities and chemical potentials of thermal pions are obtained for SPS and RHIC energies. They demonstrate that multibosonic phenomena at those energies might be considered as a correction factor rather than as a significant physical effect. The analysis of the evolution of the pion average phase-space density in chemically frozen hadron systems shows that it is almost constant or slightly increases with time while the particle density and phase-space density at each space point decreases rapidly during the system’s expansion. We found that, unlike the particle density, the average phase-space density has no direct link to the freeze-out criterion and final thermodynamic parameters, being connected rather to the initial phase-space density of hadronic matter formed in relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions.

The basic principles of the correlation femtoscopy, including its correspondence to the Hanbury Brown and Twiss intensity interferometry, are reexamined. The main subject of the paper is an analysis of the correlation femtoscopy when the source size is as small as the order of the uncertainty limit. It is about 1 fm for the current high energy experiments. Then the standard femtoscopy model of random sources is inapplicable. The uncertainty principle leads to the partial indistinguishability and coherence of closely located emitters that affect the observed femtoscopy scales. In thermal systems the role of corresponding coherent length is taken by the thermal de Broglie wavelength that also defines the size of a single emitter. The formalism of partially coherent phases in the amplitudes of closely located individual emitters is used for the quantitative analysis. The general approach is illustrated analytically for the case of the Gaussian approximation for emitting sources. A reduction of the interferometry radii and a suppression of the Bose-Einstein correlation functions for small sources due to the uncertainty principle are found. There is a positive correlation between the source size and the intercept of the correlation function. The peculiarities of the nonfemtoscopic correlations caused by minijets and fluctuations of the initial states of the systems formed in $pp$ and ${e}^{+}{e}^{-}$ collisions are also analyzed. The factorization property for the contributions of femtoscopic and nonfemtoscopic correlations into complete correlation function is observed in numerical calculations in a wide range of the model parameters.

Three-dimensional pion and kaon emission source functions are extracted from hydrokinetic model (HKM) simulations of central Au+Au collisions at the top Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) energy $\sqrt{{s}_{NN}}=200$ GeV. The model describes well the experimental data, previously obtained by the PHENIX and STAR collaborations using the imaging technique. In particular, the HKM reproduces the non-Gaussian heavy tails of the source function in the pair transverse momentum (out) and beam (long) directions, observed in the pion case and practically absent for kaons. The role of rescatterings and long-lived resonance decays in forming the mentioned long-range tails is investigated. The particle rescattering contribution to the out tail seems to be dominating. The model calculations also show substantial relative emission times between pions (with mean value 13 fm/$c$ in the longitudinally comoving system), including those coming from resonance decays and rescatterings. A prediction is made for the source functions in Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{{s}_{NN}}=2.76$ TeV, which are still not extracted from the measured correlation functions.