A study of particle–nucleus collisions at 24, 50, and 400 GeV/c

Abstract

An attempt has been made to investigate multiplicity, dispersion, and pseudorapidity distributions of shower particles produced in 24, 50, and 400 GeV/c hadron–nucleus collisions. The study of pseudorapidity reveals that with the increase in the mass number of the target nucleus, the excess of particles appears in the target fragmentation region, shifting the maxima of the distributions towards smaller values of rapidity. Further, with the increase in the incident energy, the excess of particles appears in the projectile fragmentation region. Finally, on using the additive quark model, the mean normalized multiplicity has been observed to be independent of the energy and nature of the projectile, suggesting a new kind of scaling in hadron–nucleus collisions.