Quantitative assessment of target dependence of pion fluctuation in hadronic interactions – estimation through erraticity

Event-to-event fluctuation pattern of pions produced by proton and pion beams is studied in terms of the newly defined erraticity measures χ ( p , q ), and proposed by Cao and Hwa. The analysis reveals the erratic behaviour of the produced pions signifying the chaotic multiparticle production in high-energy hadron–nucleus interactions ( π − –AgBr interactions at 350 GeV/c and p –AgBr interactions at 400 GeV/c). However, the chaoticity does not depend on whether the projectile is proton or pion. The results are compared with the results of the VENUS-generated data for the above interactions which suggests that VENUS event generator is unable to reproduce the event-to-event fluctuations of spatial patterns of final states. A comparative study of p –AgBr interactions and p – p collisions at 400 GeV/c from NA27, with the help of a quantitative parameter for the assessment of pion fluctuation, indicates conclusively that particle production process is more chaotic for hadron–nucleus interactions than for hadron–hadron interactions.