Soft color interactions and diffractive hard scattering at the Fermilab Tevatron

• An improved understanding of nonperturbative QCD can be obtained by the recently developed soft color interaction models. Their essence is the variation of color string-field topologies, giving a unified description of final states in high energy interactions, e.g., diffractive and nondiffractive events in ep and pp̅ . Here we present a detailed study of such models (the soft color interaction model and the generalized area law model) applied to pp̅ , considering also the general problem of the underlying event including beam particle remnants. With models tuned to DESY HERA ep data, we find a good description also of Fermilab Tevatron data on production of W, beauty and jets in diffractive events defined either by leading antiprotons or by one or two rapidity gaps in the forward or backward regions. We also give predictions for diffractive J/ψ production where the soft exchange mechanism produces both a gap and a color singlet cc̅ state in the same event. This soft color interaction approach is also compared with Pomeron-based models for diffraction, and some possibilities to experimentally discriminate between these different approaches are discussed.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Fysik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Physical Sciences (hsv//eng)

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ref (subject category)

art (subject category)