DETERMINING SOURCE CUMULANTS IN FEMTOSCOPY WITH GRAM–CHARLIER AND EDGEWORTH SERIES

Lowest-order cumulants provide important information on the shape of the emission source in femtoscopy. For the simple case of noninteracting identical particles, we show how the fourth-order source cumulant can be determined from measured cumulants in momentum space. The textbook Gram–Charlier series is found to be highly inaccurate, while the related Edgeworth series provides increasingly accurate estimates. Ordering of terms compatible with the Central Limit Theorem appears to play a crucial role even for non-Gaussian distributions.