INTERMITTENCY IN HIGH-ENERGY COLLISIONS AND A PHASE-TRANSITION IN THE FEYNMAN-WILSON FLUID

We study the intermittency effect in multihadron production processes as a critical phenomenon reflecting a higher-order quark-hadron phase transition in the hadronization process. We show that the production of a critical Feynman-Wilson fluid, representing the hadronized system at the critical temperature, has a fractal structure in a wide range of scales in the rapidity space. The intermittency pattern is specified by the critical exponent alone and, for each factorial moment, a minimal scale in rapidity emerges below which the power-law behavior breaks down. The relevance of the model for quark-gluon-plasma physics in present and future experiments is also discussed.