Analysis of the Pseudorapidity Distributions of the Shower Particles in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

Abstract

The pseudorapidity distributions of shower particles produced in collisions of 16O nuclei with emulsion targets at 3.7 A GeV at JINR Dubna are analyzed and compared with similar distributions from interactions involving 12C and 28Si nuclei at the same energy, as well as 22Ne at 3.3 A GeV. The resulting distributions are suitably fitted with Gaussian functions. The width (dispersion) of these distributions shows only a weak dependence on the type of projectile, while the mean pseudorapidity increases with increasing projectile mass. Furthermore, higher-order statistical moments of the distributions such as skewness and kurtosis are evaluated and discussed with characterize their shape and symmetry. It is also observed that the total charge of projectile fragments that did not undergo interaction, along with the effective size of the target nucleus, significantly influences the resulting pseudorapidity patterns. These findings help clarify the underlying mechanisms of particle production in nucleus–nucleus collisions at intermediate energies (Dubna energy).