The emission of pions produced within a dense, strongly-interacting system of matter in the presence of strong radial flow and absorption is described using a relativistic optical model formalism, replacing the attenuated or unattenuated plane waves of earlier emission function approaches with "distorted wave" solutions to a relativistic wave equation including a complex optical potential. The resulting distorted-wave emission function model (DWEF) is used in numerical calculations to fit HBT correlations and the resonance-corrected pion spectrum from central-collision STAR Au+Au pion data at <FONT FACE=Symbol>Ö</FONT>s = 200 GeV. Excellent agreement with the STAR data are obtained. This allows us to predict HBT radii over a range of centralities for both Au+Au and Cu+Cu collisions.
Distorted wave emission function; Relativistic heavy ion collisions; Optical model; Chiral symmetry restoration
