Comparative analysis of multiplicity of target fragments in a few A GeV 4He-emulsion interactions

We report an experimental measurement on the multiplicity of slow target-associated particles in the forward and backward hemispheres in the interactions of He-4 ions with emulsion nuclei at 2.1A and 3.7A GeV. The results indicate that the target fragment multiplicity does not depend on the incident kinetic energy. The dominant feature characterizing the multiplicity distributions of black and grey particles, in both forward and backward hemispheres, is exponential decay shaped curves, with the exception of the most central collisions and heavy target sizes. The results favor the nuclear limiting fragmentation hypothesis in the energy range beyond 1 GeV.