Particle production in interactions of 200 GeV/nucleon oxygen and sulfur nuclei in nuclear emulsion.

Abstract

Oxygen and sulfur nuclei with energies of 200 GeV/nucleon have been allowed to interact in nuclear emulsions exposed at CERN. These emulsions have been scanned with a minimum bias so that essentially all the interactions occurring were detected. Nearly 1000 interactions of each projectile have been analyzed. We present results on the multiplicity distributions, the pseudorapidity distributions, and the fragmentation of the projectile and target nuclei. It is shown that the mean number of intranuclear collisions in each interaction, calculated from a superposition model, provides a useful parameter for organizing the data. We conclude that there are no significant deviations even at these energies from models, such as the venus model, describing the interactions as being the superposition of individual nucleon-nucleon collisions.