2001/10/08 by Wojciech Broniówski, W. Broniowski, Wojciech Florkowski +1 · 7 citations
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Statistical Methods and Bayesian Inference #hep-ph #nucl-ex #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevc.65.024905
published as Phys.Rev. C65 (2002) 024905 · 4 pages, 2 figures, Revtex 3
arxiv created 2001/10/08 · openalex publication_date 2002/01/25 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We show, under general assumptions which are well satisfied in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, that the geometric relation of centrality c to the impact parameter b, namely c ~ pi b2/sigmainel, holds to a very high accuracy for all but most peripheral collisions. More precisely, if c(N) is the centrality of events with the multiplicity higer than N, then b is the value of the impact parameter for which the average multiplicity <n(b)> is equal to N. The corrections to this geometric formula are of the order (Delta n(b)/<n(b)>)2, where Delta n(b) is the width of the multiplicity distribution at a given value of b, hence are very small. In other words, the centrality effectively measures the impact parameter.