Results are reported concerning the charged-particle multiplicity distribution obtained in an exposure of the high-resolution hydrogen bubble chamber LEBC to a beam of 800 GeV protons at the Fermilab MPS. This is the first time that such data have been available at this energy. The distribution of the number n ch of charged particles produced in inelastic interactions obeys KNO-scaling. The average multiplicity is 〈 n ch 〉 = 10.26±0.15. For n ch ⩾8 the data can be well fitted to a negative binomial. The difference between the overall experimental multiplicity distribution and that resulting from the latter fit is in agreement with the contribution expected from diffractive processes.
We have used the Fermilab 30-in. bubble-chamber-hybrid spectrometer to study neutral-strange-particle production in the interactions of 200-GeV/c protons and π+ and K+ mesons with nuclei of gold, silver, and magnesium. Average multiplicities and inclusive cross sections for K0 and Λ are measured, and a power law is found to give a good description of their A dependence. The exponent characterizing the A dependence is consistent with being the same for K0 and Λ production, and also the same for proton and π+ beams. Average K0 and Λ multiplicities, as well as their ratio, have been measured as functions of the numbers of projectile collisions νp and secondary collisions νs in the nucleus, and indicate that rescattering contributes significantly to enhancement of Λ production but not to K0 production. The properties of events with multiple K0's or Λ's also corroborate this conclusion. K0 rapidities are in the central region and decrease gently with increasing νp, while Λ rapidities are in the target-fragmentation region and are independent of νp. K0 and Λ multiplicities increase with the rapidity loss of the projectile, but their rapidities do not.
The properties of events having the topology and kinematic features of double Pomeron exchange are described. The data were taken at the CERN pp¯ collider at s=0.63 TeV in the UA1 detector. A calorimeter trigger was used to isolate events in which a central cluster of particles was separated from forward particles by large rapidity gaps. The invariant mass M of the central cluster (possibly a colliding Pomeron-Pomeron system) covers the range 10-70 GeV/c2. The M dependence of charged particle multiplicity distributions in these double Pomeron events is strikingly different from their s dependence in pp and pp¯ interactions.
Data from p+p→p+X at 102, 205, and 405 GeV and from π−+p→p+X at 205 GeV exhibit an approximate scaling property in the charged-prong multiplicity distributions as a function of the missing mass for the range 5<~MX<~13 GeV.
Inclusive and semi-inclusive cross sections for gp0 production in 100, 200, and 360 GeV/c π−p interactions are presented. Differential cross sections for ρ0 production as functions of c.m. rapidity and transverse momentum are compared with the corresponding differential cross sections for pion production. Effects of various methods of estimating background on the values obtained for ρ0 production cross sections are discussed. About 10% of the final-state charged pions appear to come from ρ0 decay. Thus, while ρ0 production and decay is a significant source of final-state pions, other sources must contribute the majority of the produced pions.
An experiment using the Fermilab Single Arm Spectrometer (SAS) facility and an associated nonmagnetic vertex detector studied the reactions a+p→c+X, where a and c were π±, K±, p, or p¯. Extensive measurements were made at 100 and 175 GeV/c beam momenta with the outgoing hadrons detected in the SAS covering a kinematic range 0.12<x<1.0 and pT<1.25 GeV/c. Additional data covering a more restricted range in x were also gathered at 70 GeV/c incident momentum. In this high-statistics experiment, the identification of both the incoming and outgoing charged hadrons were made with a total of eight Čerenkov counters. New and extensive single-particle inclusive data for charged-particle production in low-pT hadronic fragmentation are presented. The average associated charged-particle multiplicity and pseudorapidity distributions are also given.
We have used the Fermilab 30-in. bubble-chamber hybrid spectrometer to study multiparticle production in the interactions of 200-GeV/c protons and π+ and K+ mesons with nuclei of gold, silver, and magnesium. We find that the multiplicities of produced particles and negative particles increase linearly with the number of projectile collisions, with no beam or target dependence. The number of secondary collisions in the nucleus increases significantly less rapidly with the number of projectile collisions than has been reported by a streamer chamber experiment. The properties of secondary collisions suggest that they arise from rescattering of recoil nucleons rather than intranuclear cascade of produced particles. Dispersions of multiplicity distributions at fixed impact parameter are in better agreement with a model of independent sources than with Koba-Nielsen-Olesen scaling.
Experimental multiplicity distributions scaled in the Koba-Nielsen-Olesen (KNO) form for hadron-nucleus interactions show clear deviations from the scaling distribution observed for hadron-hadron interactions. The deviations become larger as A increases. Our data can be described by a model which invokes the hypothesis that KNO scaling is valid for hadron-nucleus interactions at a fixed impact parameter. In this model, the A dependence of the multiplicity distributions results from the convolution of scatterings at various impact parameters.
The charged-particle multiplicity distribution from 250-GeV/c π−p interactions in the Fermilab 15-ft bubble chamber is presented. The corrections to the raw data are described. Fits to these data along with other high-energy bubble-chamber data show that cluster models with two components—a low-multiplicity, diffractive component and a high-multiplicity, nondiffractive component—describe the data fairly well. The charged multiplicity of each cluster is found to be ∼2, while the number of clusters for each component grows linearly with ln(s). The multiplicity moments are consistent with other experiments. We find 〈nc〉=8.427±0.059, f2cc=8.66±0.11, 〈nc〉D=2.038±0.023. The total inelastic cross section is σI=21.42±0.50 mb.
Charged-particle multiplicity distributions in 400-GeV/c pd interactions have been studied in an experiment in the Fermilab 30-inch bubble chamber. From the fractions of odd-prong and backward-proton events, a rescatter fraction of 0.22±0.01 is found (for N≥3). The pn multiplicity distribution is obtained from the odd-prong distribution plus a no-cascade assumption. After making one-prong and two-prong estimates, mean charged-particle multiplicities of 9.49±0.12 for pd (including slow particles) and 8.57±0.12 for pn are obtained. In the incident momentum range 100 to 400 GeV/c, pd and pp distributions are very similar to each other and are different from pn distributions.
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