The Gluon Exchange Model for diffractive and inelastic collisions

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Gluon Exchange Model, a unified framework based on color octet exchange, to describe hadron-hadron and hadron-nucleus collisions, accurately capturing final states and baryon transfer phenomena.

Contribution

It presents a novel, homogeneous model for hadronic collisions based on gluon exchange, providing exact descriptions of final states and baryon transfer mechanisms.

Findings

Accurate description of proton and neutron spectra in proton-proton collisions.

Demonstrates frequent disintegration of diquarks in proton-nucleus reactions.

Explains long-range baryon number transfer in nuclear collisions.

Abstract

We propose a new model for a homogeneous description of hadron-hadron and hadron-nucleus collisions, the Gluon Exchange Model, fundamentally based on color octet (gluon) exchange. In proton-proton collisions we provide an exact description of the final state proton and neutron spectrum including the proton diffractive peak. In proton-nucleus reactions we find that the projectile proton diquark cannot survive in more than about half of multiple proton-nucleon processes and consequently must be very frequently disintegrated, leading to long transfers of baryon number over rapidity space.