OBSERVATION OF INCREASING CHARGED MULTIPLICITY AS A FUNCTION OF TRANSVERSE MOMENTUM IN 28.5 GeV/c pp INTERACTIONS (P 454)

Systematic studies of multiparticle final states in PP collisions around 30 GeV/c have been carried out in bubble chambers [1]. They have covered extensively the large cross-section peripheral interactions but have had no access to rare events, e.g. large momentum transfer collisions. They have suffered from technical shortcomings in identifying the final state protons. The simplest features of the data, i.e. single particle inclusive distributions and two-body correlations can be understood in terms of the production and decay characteristics of the excited nucleon system (nova model) [2]. The data appear insensitive to detailed features of the dynamics. A study of collisions imparting higher transverse momentum to the incident proton may be more sensitive to the dynamics since in that case one is probing a more central region of the proton. With this motivation we have initiated a study of such central collisions with a novel instrument, the Multiparticle Argo Spectrometer System [3] (MASS), at the AGS