Evidence for xi- and t-dependent damping of the Pomeron Flux in the proton

Abstract

We show that a triple-Regge parametrization of inclusive single diffraction agrees with the data in the following two domains: (a) xi > 0.03 at all t, (b) |t| > 1 GeV^2 at all xi. Since the triple-Regge parametrization fails when applied to the full xi-t range of the total single-diffractive cross section, we conclude that damping occurs only at low-xi and low-|t|. We give a (``toy'') parametrization of the damping factor, D(xi), valid at low-|t|, which describes the diffractive differential cross-section (dsig/dt) data at the ISR and roughly accounts for the observed s-dependence of diffractive total cross-section up to Tevatron energies. However, an effective damping factor calculated for the CDF fitted function for dsig/dxidt at sqrt(s} = 1800 GeV and |t| = 0.05 GeV^2, suggests that, at fixed-xi, damping increases as s increases. We conjecture that, in the regions where the triple-Regge formalism describes the data and there is no evidence of damping, factorization is valid and the Pomeron-flux-factor may be universal. With the assumption that the observed damping is due to multi-Pomeron exchange, our results imply that the recent UA8 demonstration that the effective Pomeron trajectory flattens for |t| > 1 GeV$^2 is evidence for the onset of the perturbative 2-gluon pomeron. Our damping results may also shed some light on the self-consistency of recent measurements of hard-diffractive jet production cross sections in the UA8, CDF and ZEUS experiments.

19 pages, 7 Encapsulated Postscript figures, LaTex, Phys. Lett. B (in press - 1998)

References in corpus (3)

• Inclusive Measurement of Diffractive Deep-inelastic ep Scattering
• Measurements of Single Diffraction at sqrt(s) = 630 GeV; Evidence for a Non-Linear alpha(t) of the Pomeron
• Cross Section Measurements of Hard Diffraction at the SPS-Collider

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Nonperturbative Effects in Gluon Radiation and Photoproduction of Quark Pairs
• Factorization and Scaling in Hadronic Diffraction
• Nonperturbative Gluon Radiation and Energy Dependence of Elastic Scattering
• Soft QCD Dynamics of Elastic Scattering in Impact Parameter Representation
• Evidences for two scales in hadrons
• Large Rapidity Gap Processes in Proton-Nucleus Collisions
• Soft Color Interactions and Diffractive Hard Scattering at the Fermilab Tevatron
• Diffractive gauge bosons production beyond QCD factorisation
• Inclusive Double Pomeron Exchange at the Fermilab Tevatron pbar-p Collider
• Analysis on the diffractive production of W's and dijets at the DESY HERA and Fermilab Tevatron colliders
• Central Pseudorapidity Gaps in Events with a Leading Antiproton at the Fermilab Tevatron pbar-p Collider
• Glueballs and the Pomeron
• Glueball masses and Regge trajectories for the QCD-inspired potential
• A new gamma*-p / pbar-p factorization test in diffraction, valid below Q^2 about 6 GeV^2
• Triple Pomeron and Proton Diffraction Dissociation
• Multipomeron quasi-eikonal model for single diffraction processes