Fractal study of pion void probability distribution in ultrarelativistic nuclear collision and its target dependence

Abstract

There are numerous existing works on investigating the dynamics of particle production process in ultrarelativistic nuclear collision. In the past, fluctuation of spatial pattern has been analyzed in terms of the scaling behavior of voids. But analysis of the scaling behavior of the void in fractal scenario has not been explored yet. In this work, we have analyzed the fractality of void probability distribution with a completely different and rigorous method called visibility graph analysis, analyzing the void-data produced out of fluctuation of pions in [Formula: see text]S–AgBr interaction at 200 GeV in pseudo-rapidity [Formula: see text] and azimuthal angle [Formula: see text] space. The power of scale-freeness of visibility graph denoted by PSVG is a measure of fractality, which can be used as a quantitative parameter for the assessment of the state of chaotic system. As the behavior of particle production process depends on the target excitation, we can dwell down the void probability distribution in the event-wise fluctuation resulted out of the high energy interaction for different degree of target excitation, with respect to the fractal scenario and analyze the scaling behavior of the voids. From the analysis of the PSVG parameter, we have observed that scaling behavior of void probability distribution in multipion production changes with increasing target excitation. Since visibility graph method is a classic method of complex network analysis, has been applied over fractional Brownian motion (fBm) and fractional Gaussian noises (fGn) to measure the fractality and long-range dependence of a time series successfully, we can quantitatively confirm that fractal behavior of the void probability distribution in particle production process depends on the target excitation.