INTERMITTENCY IN HIGH-ENERGY AND NUCLEAR COLLISIONS

We calculate scaled factorial moments for ultra-relativistic collisions, using a cluster model that assumes only rough boost invariance of the cluster distribution and independent emission of pions from clusters. We find that the different moments are not independent, but are related by a simple scaling law. We show that the second moment contains the least statistical error, and is therefore the most useful for analyzing the behavior of the moments for small bin size. We also find that moments scale with the inverse of the rapidity density, if the cluster size is fixed. This scaling is not seen in the data; instead, the heavy-ion events contain larger clusters than are observed in the hadronic collisions. This disparity in cluster size indicates that spatial intermittency may be stronger in heavy-ion collisions than in the hadronic and light-ion collisions. © 1990.