Particle production in p+A collisions at 14.6 GeV/c

In the last few years, studies of heavy-ion collisions at high energy have produced new insight into the production of nuclear matter at high baryon density and temperature. While heavy-ion reactions at AGS energy are now well characterized, to clarify and test our understanding of the reaction mechanism of these collisions it is important to study the underlying processes involved. The study of p-A collisions should be particularly useful to understand in which way A-A collisions differ from the simple superposition of nucleon-nucleon collisions and it may be a specially severe test of the validity of the models in describing the transition from a single collision problem to a thermodynamic problem mainly defined by a few observables. In particular, p-A collisions should be sensitive to the way nucleons propagate in the nuclear medium and thus provide more insight on: the importance of rescattering, the stopping power of normal nuclear matter, and possibly on the influence of the nuclear matter density and temperature on the hadronic cross sections. In this paper we present the transverse energy and charged particle multiplicity distributions in proton induced collisions on Al, and Pb targets at 14.6GeV/c. These data have been obtained as part of the E814 collaboration and are thus immediately comparable to similar data obtained for 28Si and Au induced reactions at the same energy