Erraticity of rapidity gaps - art. no. 014003

The use of rapidity gaps is proposed as a measure of the spatial pattern of an event. When the event multiplicity is low, the gaps between neighboring particles carry far more information about an event than multiplicity spik es, which may occur very rarely. Two moments of the gap distribution are su ggested for characterizing an event. The fluctuations of those moments from event to event are then quantified by an entropy-like measure, which serve s to describe erraticity. We use ECOMB to Simulate the exclusive rapidity d istribution of each event, from which the erraticity measures are calculate d. The dependences of those measures on the order q of the moments provide single-parameter characterizations of erraticity.