Branching, geometrical scaling, and Koba-Nielsen-Olesen scaling

Abstract
The phenomenon of Koba-Nielsen-Olesen scaling up to about 100 GeV in c.m. energy in pp collision is described in a branching model supplemented by impact-parameter smearing with geometrical scaling as an essential input. A high-accuracy fit of all data points from CERN ISR is achieved by use of only one parameter, which relates the particle productivity to hadron opacity at each impact parameter. It is deduced that the average number of initial clusters is between 4 and 5, depending upon the energy.