Participant number fluctuations for higher moments of a multiplicity distribution

Abstract

The independent participant model is generalized for skewness and kurtosis. The obtained relations allow to calculate the fluctuations of an arbitrarily high order. From the comparison with the SPS and the LHC data it is found that the participants are not nucleons. The contribution of the participant fluctuations increases with the order of fluctuations. The 5% centrality bins selected for the analysis at the LHC by ALICE seems to be too large. The fluctuations measures are dominated by the fluctuations of participants there. The method to quantify the value of participant number fluctuations experimentally is proposed.