STUDY OF MULTIPARTICLE SPIKES IN CENTRAL 4.5A GEV C C-CU COLLISIONS/

An analysis of local fluctuations, or spikes, is performed for charged particles produced in central C-Cu collisions at 4.5 GeV/c/nucleon. T he distributions of spike centers and the maximum density distribution s are investigated for different narrow pseudorapidity windows to sear ch for multiparticle dynamical correlations. Two peaks over statistica l background are observed in the spike-center distributions with the s tructure similar to that expected from the coherent gluon radiation mo del and recently found in hadronic interactions. The dynamical contrib ution to maximum density fluctuations is obtained to be hidden by stat istical correlations, although behavior of the distributions shows qua litative agreement with that from the one-dimensional intermittency mo del. The observed features of the two different approaches, coherent v s, stochastic, to the formation of the local dynamical fluctuations ar e discussed. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.