Ringlike inelastic events in cosmic rays and accelerators

Abstract

In cosmic rays and in accelerators there were observed single inelastic processes with densely produced (azimuthally isotropic) groups of particles exhibiting spikes in the pseudorapidity plot of an individual event (i.e. ringlike events). Theoretically the existence of such processes was predicted as a consequence of Cerenkov gluon radiation or, more generally, of deconfinement radiation. Nowadays some tens of such events have been accumulated at 400 GeV and at 150 TeV. Analyzing ringlike events in proton-nucleon interactions at 400 GeV/c it is shown that they exhibit striking irregularity in the positions of pseudorapidity spikes' centers which tend to lie mostly at 55,90 and 125 deg in cms. It implies rather small deconfinement lengths of the order of some fermi.