INTERMITTENCY IN HEAVY-ION COLLISIONS

This paper describes a study of multiplicity and transverse energy fluctuations using factorial moments for sulphur collisions with silver-bromide emulsion and platinum targets at 200 GeV/A. The data were taken with the HELIOS experiment at CERN. Bialas and Peschanski [1] predicted a power law dependence of the moments on the rapidity bin size if the fluctuations are invariant over a range of scales. This pattern is known as intermittency in the theory of turbulence, and indicates a fractal structure. Fluctuations were studied for a range of pseudorapidity scales using scaled factorial moments. Correlated fluctuations were studied using correlated scaled factorial moments. For peripheral collisions the data are weakly intermittent and consistent with a simple cascading mechanism, the alpha model. For central collisions no clear signal of intermittency was seen.