Centrality dependence of the thermal excitation-energy deposition in 8-15 GeV/c hadron-Au reactions

TL;DR

This study investigates how excitation energy and particle multiplicities in hadron-gold reactions depend on collision centrality, revealing a consistent increase with centrality across different collision systems.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of excitation energy deposition as a function of centrality in hadron-Au reactions at GeV energies, highlighting a uniform dependence on grey track multiplicity.

Findings

Excitation energy per residue nucleon increases with centrality.

Particle multiplicities also increase with centrality.

The dependence on grey track number is uniform across systems.

Abstract

The excitation energy per residue nucleon (E*/A) and fast and thermal light particle multiplicities are studied as a function of centrality defined as the number of grey tracks emitted N_grey and by the mean number of primary hadron-nucleon scatterings <nu> and mean impact parameter <b> extracted from it. The value of E*/A and the multiplicities show an increase with centrality for all systems, 14.6 GeV p-Au and 8.0 GeV pi-Au and pbar-Au collisions, and the excitation energy per residue nucleon exhibits a uniform dependence on N_grey.