Measurement of two-particle semi-inclusive rapidity distributions at the CERN ISR

Summary  We present data on the semi-inclusive distributions of rapidities of secondary particles produced in pp collisions at very high energies. Our experiment was performed at the CERN Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR). The data given here, at centre-of-mass energies of √s=23 and 62 GeV, include the single-particle distributions and two-particle correlations. The semi-inclusive correlations show pronounced short-range correlation effects which have a width considerably narrower than in the case of inclusive correlations. We show that these short-range effects can be understood empirically in terms of three parameters whose energy and multiplicity dependence are studied. The data support the picture of multiparticle production in which clusters of small multiplicity and small dispersion are emitted with subsequent decay into hadrons.