Multiplicities in ultrarelativistic proton-(anti)proton collisions and negative binomial distribution fits

摘要

Likelihood ratio tests are performed for the hypothesis that charged-particlemultiplicities measured in proton-(anti)proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 0.9and 2.36 TeV are distributed according to the negative binomial form. Resultsindicate that the hypothesis should be rejected in the all cases of ALICE-LHCmeasurements in the limited pseudo-rapidity windows, whereas should be acceptedin the corresponding cases of UA5 data. Possible explanations of that and ofthe disagreement with the least-squares fitting method are given.