Partonic Effects on Pion Interferometry at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

Using a multiphase transport (AMPT) model that includes both initial partonic and final hadronic interactions, we study the pion interferometry at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. We find that the two-pion correlation function is sensitive to the magnitude of the parton scattering cross section, which controls the parton density at which the transition from the partonic to hadronic matter occurs. Also, the emission source of pions is non-Gaussian, leading to source radii that can be more than twice larger than the radius parameters extracted from a Gaussian fit to the correlation function.