Unified description of angular distributions of target particles in light and heavy ion induced interactions in nuclear emulsions at high energies

Abstract

Some investigations show that in light ion (LI) induced reactions, such as He, O, Ne, and Ar in nuclear emulsions (Em) at high energies, the angular distributions of the target particles show a wide structure around the polar angle ν ≈ 60°. With heavy ions (HI) such as Kr and Au such a wide structure has not been observed. The experimental results on Mg—Em and Si—Em interactions also do not show such a wide structure in the angular distribution of the target particles. Using a multisource ideal gas model we uniformly describe the angular distributions of the target particles produced in LI—Em and HI—Em interactions. The result is not only in agreement with the mean trend, but also with the fluctuations of the experimental data. We conclude that the wide structure observed in LI—Em interactions may be the result of statistical fluctuations.