On statistical mechanics developments of clan concept in multiparticle production

Clan concept has been introduced in multiparticle dynamics in order to interpret the wide occurrence of negative binomial (NB) regularity in n-charged particle multiplicity distributions (MDs) in various high energy collisions. The centrality of clan concept led to the attempt to justify its occurrence within a statistical model of clan formation and evolution. In this framework all thermodynamical potentials have been explicitly calculated in terms of the NB parameters. Interestingly it was found that NB parameter k corresponds to the one particle canonical partition function. The goal of this paper is to explore a possible temperature T and volume V dependence of the parameter k in various classes of events in high energy hadron–hadron collisions. It is shown that the existence of a phase transition at parton level from the ideal clan gas associated to the semihard component with k>1 to the ideal clan gas of the hard component with k<1 implies a discontinuity in the average number of particles at hadron level.