ACCEPTANCE DEPENDENCE OF FLUCTUATION IN PARTICLE MULTIPLICITY

Abstract

The effect of limiting the acceptance in rapidity on event-by-event multiplicity fluctuations in nucleus–nucleus collisions has been investigated. Our analysis shows that the multiplicity fluctuations decrease when the rapidity acceptance is decreased. We explain this trend by assuming that the probability distribution of the particles in the smaller acceptance window follows binomial distribution. Following a simple statistical analysis, we conclude that the event-by-event multiplicity fluctuations for full acceptance are likely to be larger than those observed in the experiments, since the experiments usually have detectors with limited acceptance. We discuss the application of our model to simulated data generated using VENUS, a widely used event generator in heavy-ion collisions. We also discuss the results from our calculations in the presence of dynamical fluctuations and possible observation of these in the actual data.