Proton-Nucleus Interactions at High Energies and Scaling

Abstract

In proton-nucleus interactions at 200 GeV in nuclear emulsion we have found that in the projectile region the multiplicity is independent of the target nucleus, while in the target region it is approximately proportional to the nuclear thickness. After carefully excluding the elastic and the coherent events, we find that the secondary particles produced in $p$-nucleus collisions obey the same Koba-Nielsen-Olesen scaling as found previously in $p-p$ collisions.