Backward emitted high-energy neutrons in hard reactions of p and pi^+ on carbon

Abstract

Beams of protons and pions of 5.9 GeV/c were incident on a C target. Neutrons emitted into the back hemisphere, in the laboratory system, were detected in (triple) coincidence with two emerging $p_t>$0.6 GeV/c particles. We present the momentum spectra of the backward going neutrons, which have the same universal shape observed in earlier (inclusive) reactions induced by hadrons, $\gamma$, $\nu$, and $\bar{\nu }$ beams. We also integrated the spectra and determined the fraction of the hard scattering events which are in coincidence with at least one neutron emitted into the back hemisphere, with momenta above 0.32 GeV/c. Contrary to the earlier measurements which found that only a small fraction (of the order of 10%) of the total inelastic cross section for light nuclei was associated with backward going nucleons, we find that about half of the events are of this nature. We speculate that the reason for the large difference is the strong total center of mass (s) dependence of the hard reaction and short range nucleon correlations in nuclei.

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Cited by in corpus (8)

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• n-p Short-Range Correlations from (p,2p + n) Measurements
• Nuclear Transparency in 90 Degree c.m. Quasielastic A(p,2p) Reactions
• Probing short-range correlations in asymmetric nuclei with quasi-free pair knockout reactions
• Proton-proton momentum correlation function as a probe of the high momentum tail of the nucleon momentum distribution
• "Buddha's Light" of Cumulative Particles