Chaotic sources and percolation of strings in heavy ion collisions

The chaoticity parameter of Bose–Einstein correlations is studied as a tool for analyzing the interaction between color strings in multiparticle production at high energies. Different scenarios of this interaction lead to a different behavior of with energy and atomic number of the participants. Comparison to the present experimental data favors the percolation of strings scenario. The one of its versions in which shows a peculiar dependence on the string density, very similar to the dependence of the fractional average cluster size, looks particularly attractive. Received: 19 February 2001 / Revised version: 5 July 2001 / Published online: 10 August 2001