\, .
\label{criteria}\end{aligned}$$ Here $N_{\rm bin}$ is the number of observed central Au + Au collisions for which the central multiplicity of the bin is $N_{\rm qg}$. The right–hand side of eq. (\[criteria\]) is the magnitude of the rare events to the overall multiplicity, while the left hand side gives the statistical resolution. The assumption here is that $q$ is small, so that at $N_{\rm qg}$ we can use $P_n \sim P_n^{\rm had}$ for the left–hand side.

To obtain a feeling for the shape and applicability of eqs. (\[nbd\]) and (\[criteria\]) we plot in Figures 10 and 11 different negatively charged particle multiplicity distributions as might be expected for central Au + Au collisions at AGS with $E_{\rm beam} = 11.6$ GeV/A. From  [@multi] we obtained the mean for purely hadronic events to be $N_{\rm had} = 145$. This is slightly larger than the value $N_{\rm had} = 131 \pm 21$ cited in [@multi] for $355 \pm 7$ participating nucleons since we are assuming that all $2 A$ nucleons are participating in the collision. The result depicted in Figure 8 for the upper limit on the additional number of negatively charged pions produced per participating baryon allows us to deduce 