Color transparency, color opacity, and fluctuations in nuclear collisions

Abstract

Fluctuations in the wave functions of hadrons in inelastic interactions with nuclei are important for nuclear collisions at high energy, where the internal hadronic configurations can be considered frozen. Modeling fluctuations by a distribution of cross sections, we calculate their effect on multiplicity and transverse energy production in central high-energy nuclear collisions, and find that they can account for the large fluctuations found experimentally.