Pion interferometry and intermittency in heavy-ion collisions

We study the expectations of the conventional theory of soft hadronic interactions, based on the Reggeon calculus and on the generalized optical theorem, for the Bose-Einstein correlations between identical pions. The attention is mainly focused on heavy-ion collisions, where the presence of large nuclear scales significantly improves the predictive power of the theory. We find that the interferometry image of the "radiating source" is that of a pancake, with a nuclear transverse size and a hadronic longitudinal size. The implications of our results for the studies of intermittency are pointed out. A tentative extension of this discussion to hadron-hadron collisions is also presented.