Centrality dependence of thermal excitation-energy deposition in 14.6 GeV/c p+Au reactions and 8.0 GeV/c pbar/$\pi ^{-}$+Au reactions

Experiments E900 and E900a recorded data from proton, $\pi ^{-}$, and antiproton induced reactions on Au using the at the BNL AGS using the ISIS 4$\pi $ spectrometer. The energy and angular distributions for light-charged particles with E/A$\ge $8 MeV and intermediate mass fragements with 3$\le $Z$\le $16 were used to extract the excitation energy deposition for each event. We analyzed data for the highest energy runs of 8 and 14.6 GeV using protons with 30$\le $E$\le $350 MeV (grey protons) to extract the mean number of hadron-nucleon inelastic scatterings (nu) and the mean impact parameter (b) as a function of the grey track multiplicity. The analysis follows that of Experiment E910 and previous emulsion experiments of hadron-nucleus collisions in that an assumed distribution for the grey track multiplicity was convoluted with a glauber distribution and fit to the data. Systematic errors were estimated by varying the shape of the assumed distributions, the grey track cuts, and the hadron-nucleon cross-section of the glauber model. The thermal excitation-energy deposition will be presented as a function of the mean number of hadron-nucleon scatterings and the mean impact parameter.