Leading proton spectrum from DIS at HERA

Abstract

The QCD hardness scale for secondary particles ($h$) production in semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering (DIS), $ep\to e^{\prime }Xh$, gradually decreases from $Q^2$, the photon virtuality which determines the hard scale in the virtual photon (current) fragmentation region to a soft, hadronic, scale in the proton fragmentation region. This suggests similarity of the inclusive spectra of leading protons and neutrons, $h=p,n$, in high energy hadron-proton and virtual photon-proton collisions. We explore this similarity extending to the DIS regime the nonperturbative peripheral mechanisms of inelastic scattering traditionally used in hadronic interactions to explain fast nucleons production. While the production of leading neutrons is known to be exhausted by DIS off charged pions, the production of leading protons by DIS off neutral pions must be supplemented by a substantial contribution from isoscalar reggeon ($f_0$) exchange extrapolated down to moderate values of $x_L$. We comment on the $x$ and $Q^2$ dependence of leading proton production as a probe of a universal pattern of the $x,Q^2$ evolution of the nucleon and meson (reggeon) structure functions at small $x$.

13 pages, 4 Postscript figures

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Cited by in corpus (20)

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• Dissociation of virtual photons in events with a leading proton at HERA
• The Hadronic Final State at HERA
• Do the E866 Drell Yan data change our picture of the chiral structure of the nucleon ?
• Leading proton production in e^+p collisions at HERA
• Leading neutron energy and pT distributions in deep inelastic scattering and photoproduction at HERA
• The Sea of Quarks and Antiquarks in the Nucleon: a Review
• Photoproduction with a Leading Proton at HERA
• Measurement of Dijet Cross Sections in ep Interactions with a Leading Neutron at HERA
• Single- and central-diffractive production of open charm and bottom mesons at the LHC: theoretical predictions and experimental capabilities
• Gluon saturation and Feynman scaling in leading neutron production
• Exclusive processes with a leading neutron in $ep$ collisions
• Determination of neutron fracture functions from a global QCD analysis of leading neutron production at HERA
• Phenomenology of leading nucleon production in $ep$ collisions at HERA in the framework of fracture functions
• Systematics of Leading Particle Production
• Multiparticle production and initial quasi-temperature from proton induced carbon collisions at $p_{Lab}=31$ GeV/$c$
• Regge Analysis of Diffractive and Leading Baryon Structure Functions from DIS
• Impact of new results from the ultraperipheral collision on modeling the proton and neutron emission in photon-induced nuclear processes