High-energy hadron-nucleus collisions

A new space-time model for hadron-nucleus collision is proposed, in which produced particles at the instant of creation not only are immature, but their maturity rate is enhanced in the presence of other hadronic matter, as in a nucleus. The model's only free parameter, describing the maturity enhancement, is fixed by normalizing to the 200-GeV $p-A$ multiplicity data at a fixed $A$. The parameter-free model then predicts correctly the $p-A$ differential multiplicity as function of the pseudorapidity $\eta$ and $A$, the multiplicity energy dependence, the $\pi -A$ differential multiplicity, and the $A$ dependences of ${\sigma }_{\mathrm{inel}}^{\mathrm{pA}}$ of ${\sigma }_{\mathrm{inel}}^{\pi A}$. We also show quantitatively that the so-called cut-type model and fan-plus-cut-type model do not agree with the data.