Features of compound multiplicity in heavy-ion interactions at 4.5AGeV/c

This paper mainly deals with some important features of compound multiplicity in the inelastic nuclear reactions induced by 4.5A GeV/c carbon and silicon ions in nuclear emulsion. The characteristics of this parameter observed in the present study are compared with the corresponding values obtained for proton-emulsion interactions at the same incident momentum per nucleon. The average compound multiplicity is found to vary linearly with black and heavy particle multiplicities. Finally, the compound multiplicity distributions for carbon- and silicon-emulsion interactions are observed to obey a Koba-Nielsen-Olesen (KNO) type of scaling law.