Particle Production in Hadron - Nuclear Matter in the Energy Range Between 50-GeV - 150-GeV

In an experiment at the CERN SPS the particle production in hadron-nucleus collisions in an energy range between 50 and 150 GeV was studied. The detector detects charged particles and separates them into two groups: fast particles, mainly produced pions, and slow particles, mainly recoil protons from the nucleus, whereby the boundary lies at a velocity v/c = 0.7. Multiplicity and angular respectively pseudo-rapidity distributions were measured. From the data analysis resulted that the slow particles are a measure for the number of collisions < ν > of the projectile in the nucleus. The properties of the fast particle were studied in dependence on < ν >. Thereby it was shown that at a description of the measured results using the variable < ν > the dependence on the projectile and on the mass number A of the target are extensively eliminated.