Intermittency and correlations in 200 GeV/nucleon S+S and S+Au collisions

We have studied one- and two-dimensional scaled factorial moments in S-32+S and S-32+Au collisions at 200 GeV/nucleon in a high statistics electronic measurement at the CERN SPS using pad-readout streamer tubes. We observe no intermittency signal beyond that produced by folding the FRITIOF event generator with a detailed model of our detector. The systematic effects of detector response, two-track separation, and finite statistics in a factorial moment analysis are discussed in detail. Even though the observed signal contains measurable distortions due to these experimental effects, we show that we are sensitive to intermittency. As an alternative method, a two-particle correlation function analysis was applied to the same data to measure correlated particle production at small scales. We show that this method does not suffer as much as the factorial moment analysis does from distortions due to the limited two-track resolution of the detector. The correlation functions also agree with the predictions of FRITIOF filtered through our detector simulation, down to the limit of the two-track resolution. Since FRITIOF models nucleus-nucleus collisions by the superposition of nucleon-nucleon collisions, we conclude that there is no evidence in our data of the kinds of collective behavior predicted to give strong intermittency in heavy ion collisions.