Significance of the negative binomial distribution in multiplicity phenomena

Abstract

The negative binomial distribution (NBD) has been theorized to express a scale-invariant property of many-body systems and has been consistently shown to outperform other statistical models in both describing the multiplicity of quantum-scale events in particle collision experiments and predicting the prevalence of cosmological observables, such as the number of galaxies in a region of space. Despite its widespread applicability and empirical success in these contexts, a theoretical justification for the NBD from first principles has remained elusive for fifty years. The accuracy of the NBD in modeling hadronic, leptonic, and semileptonic processes is suggestive of a highly general principle, which is yet to be understood. This study demonstrates that a statistical event of the NBD can in fact be derived in a general context via the dynamical equations of a canonical ensemble of particles in Minkowski space. These results describe a fundamental feature of many-body systems that is consistent with data from the ALICE and ATLAS experiments and provides an explanation for the emergence of the NBD in these multiplicity observations. Two methods are used to derive this correspondence: the Feynman path integral and a hypersurface parametrization of a propagating ensemble.