Pion Multiplicity Distribution in Proton-Antiproton Annihilation at Rest

Abstract

The pion multiplicity distribution is widely believed to reflect the statistical aspects of $\bar{p}p$ annihilation at rest. We try to reproduce it in a grand canonical picture with explicit conservation of electric charge, isospin, total angular momentum, and the parity quantum numbers $P$, $C$, and $G$ via the projection operator formalism. Bose statistics is found to be non-negligible, particularly in fixing the interaction volume. The calculated pion multiplicity distribution for $\left\langle n_{\pi} \right\rangle = 5$ turns out to depend strongly on the conservation of the angular momentum and connected quantum numbers, as well as on the spin state occupation in S-wave annihilation. However, the empirical Gaussian pion multiplicity distribution cannot be reproduced. This calls in question either the statistical ansatz or the rather old data themselves.