Rapidities of produced particles in 200-GeV/ c. pi. sup + /p/K sup + interactions on Au, Ag, and Mg

We have used the Fermilab 30-in. bubble chamber--hybrid spectrometer to study the rapidities of produced particles'' in the interactions of 200-GeV/{ital c} protons and {pi}{sup +} and {ital K}{sup +} mesons with nuclei of gold, silver, and magnesium. The average rapidity decreases linearly with the number of projectile collisions {nu}{sub {ital p}} (up to {nu}{sub {ital p}}=5) with no {ital A} dependence and little beam dependence. The ratio {ital R} of normalized rapidity distributions for hadron-nucleus to hadron-proton interactions shows a plateau in the central region, and becomes much larger in the target region. However, the increase is significantly less than has been reported in previous experiments. As a function of {nu}{sub {ital p}}, the ratio {ital R} rises linearly in the target region, more gently in the central region, and decreases slowly in the projectile region, in all cases with no {ital A} dependence. Some discrepancies with a previous experiment are observed in the central region. Long-range rapidity correlations are observed in hadron-nucleus events, but not in hadron-proton events. For the former, it is shown that the correlations exist only for those events with multiple projectile collisions, as expected in the multichain dual parton model.