On the mechanism of inelastic proton-nucleus interactions at 24 GeV/c

The mechanism of inelastic proton-nucleus interactions at approximately 25 GeV energy of incident particles has been investigated. The predictions of the tube and cascade models about the dependence of mean shower multiplicity on the mass number of the target nucleus and the energy of incident particles have been compared with the experimental results. Several other results such as the effective number of nucleons in nucleon-nucleus collisions, the values of the charge multiplicity, etc., have been experimentally obtained and compared with the predictions of the models. It has been concluded that the cascade mechanism of interactions, which takes into account the 'trailing effect', satisfactorily explains many of the observed results. (author)