Evidence of self-affine multiplicity fluctuations of proton emission in ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions

Abstract

Self-affine multiplicity scaling is investigated in the framework of a two-dimensional factorial moment methodology using the concept of the Hurst exponent (H). Our investigation on experimental data of the medium energy target protons (gray particles) emitted in ${}^{32}\mathrm{S}\ensuremath{-}\mathrm{A}\mathrm{g}\mathrm{B}\mathrm{r}$ interactions at 200A GeV and ${}^{16}\mathrm{O}\ensuremath{-}\mathrm{A}\mathrm{g}\mathrm{B}\mathrm{r}$ interactions at 60A GeV reveals that a better power-law behavior is exhibited in self-affine analysis at $H=0.4$ in both type of interactions. This work reports the first ever evidence of self-affine behavior of knocked out target protons.