  Multiplicity fluctuations in the forward hemisphere were studied for
positively, negatively and all charged hadrons produced in central Pb+Pb
collisions at 20A, 30A, 40A, 80A and 158A GeV. The multiplicity distributions
and their scaled variances are presented as a function of collision energy,
rapidity and transverse momentum. The distributions have a bell-like shape and
the scaled variance changes monotonously with energy in the range from 0.8 to
1.2. No indication of the critical point is observed.
  The string-hadronic model UrQMD reproduces results on the scaled variance.
The predictions of the hadron-resonance gas model obtained within the
grand-canonical and canonical ensembles for the scaled variance disagree with
the data.

Nuclear Experiment