Photonuclear interactions at very high energies and vector meson dominance

TL;DR

This paper models nucleon electromagnetic structure functions at high energies using a two-component approach combining vector meson dominance for soft interactions and dipole factorization for hard interactions, matching experimental data well.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed two-component model incorporating vector meson dominance and dipole interactions to describe deep inelastic scattering at high energies.

Findings

Model accurately fits experimental structure function data.

Soft interactions modeled via vector meson dominance with excitations.

Hard interactions described by dipole cross section with Regge s-dependence.

Abstract

We show that nucleon electromagnetic structure functions of deep inelastic scattering in Regge-Gribov limit (fixed Q-squared, asymptotically large 1/x and s) can be well described in the two-component (soft + hard) approach. In the concrete model elaborated by authors, the soft part of the virtual photon-nucleon scattering is given by the vector meson dominance, with taking into account the radial excitations of the rho-meson and nondiagonal transitions in meson-nucleon interactions. The hard part is calculated by using the dipole factorization, i.e., the process is considered as the dissociation of the photon into a q and anti-q - pair (the "color dipole") and the subsequent interaction of this dipole with the nucleon. The dipole cross section has a Regge-type s-dependence and vanishes in the limit of large transverse sizes of the dipole. We give the brief description of the model and present results of the detailed comparison of model predictions with experimental data for electromagnetic structure functions of the nucleon.