Diffractive dissociation in the interacting gluon model

Abstract

We have extended the interacting gluon model to calculate diffractive mass spectra generated in hadronic collisions. We show that it is possible to treat both diffractive and nondiffractive events on the same footing, in terms of gluon-gluon collisions. A systematic analysis of available data is performed. The energy dependence of diffractive mass spectra is addressed. They show a moderate narrowing at increasing energies. Predictions for CERN LHC energies are presented. ͓S0556-2821͑97͒06703-9͔

The Interacting Gluon Model: a review

“…Its original application to the description of inelasticity [12] and multiparticle production processes in hydrodynamical treatments [13] was followed by more refined applications to leading charm production [14] and to single diffraction dissociation, both in hadronic reactions [15] and in reactions originated by photons [16]. These works allowed for providing the systematic description of the leading particle spectra [17] and clearly demonstrated that they are very sensitive to the amount of gluonic component in the diffracted hadron as observed in [18] and [19].…”

“…In Ref. [15] we have shown that the introduction of the above metioned cuts drastically reduces the energy ( √ s) dependence of the diffractive mass distributions leading, in particular, to the approximate 1/M 2 X behaviour for all values of √ s from ISR to Tevatron energies. Here these cuts produce another type of scaling, which may be called "projectile scaling" or "projectile universality of the diffractive peak" and which means that for large enough x L the diffractive peak is the same for all projectiles.…”

“…The first test of a model of diffractive dissociation (SD) is the ability to properly describe the mass (M X ) distribution of diffractive systems, which has been measured in many experiments [51] and parametrized as (M In Ref. [15] we studied diffractive mass distributions using the Interacting Gluon Model focusing on their energy dependence and their connection with inelasticity distributions. One advantage of the IGM is that it was designed in such a way that the energy-momentum conservation is taken care of before all other dynamical aspects.…”

“…1, respectively. Notice that α is essentially a new parameter here, which should be of the order of the ratio between the total diffractive and total inelastic cross sections [15].…”

“…where p d = 0.05 (see [15]) instead of p = 0.5, which holds for the entire gluon population in the proton. In order to make contact with the analysis performed by HERA experimental groups we consider two possible momentum distributions for the gluons inside IP .…”