Abstract
A unified formula on multiplicity distributions of final-state particles is studied in this paper to describe a variety of experimental data including multiplicity, mass, transverse mass, excitation energy, transverse energy, and transverse momentum distributions. It is assumed that the sources of final-state particles are subjected to the multi-source thermal model and the contributions of sources meet the Erlang distribution. Further the validity of the unified formula in descriptions of different distributions is tested. Experimental data of proton-antiproton
positron–proton (
e
+
p
), electron-proton (
e
−
p
), and nucleus-nucleus (
AA
) collisions are analyzed and found that the distributions of mentioned quantities can be described by the multi-component Erlang distribution.