Color transparency in hard $pd$ collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates color transparency in high-energy proton-deuteron collisions, demonstrating that certain experimental conditions minimize nuclear uncertainties and proposing a new method to study this QCD phenomenon in deuteron-deuteron interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a method to study color transparency in $d(p,pp)n$ reactions at 15 GeV/c, reducing nuclear uncertainties and suggests a new approach for $dd$ collisions.

Findings

Color transparency effects can be identified for spectator neutron transverse momenta ≤ 0.4 GeV/c.

Nuclear uncertainties are minimized by focusing on the deuteron wave function at large momenta.

A new method for studying color transparency in $dd$ collisions is proposed.

Abstract

As one of the predictions of perturbative QCD, the effect of color transparency has been the focus of attention in the community studying modifications of hadrons in nuclear medium for several decades. The search for this effect in reactions involving heavy nuclei can be complicated by uncertainties in nuclear characteristics (nucleon density distributions and wave functions), which can affect the interpretation of experiments. In this work, we consider the reaction $d(p,pp)n$ at $p_{\rm lab}=15$ GeV/c caused by hard elastic $pp$ scattering, in which these uncertainties are actually reduced to the behavior of the deuteron wave function at large momenta. It is shown that for transverse momenta of the spectator neutron $\leq 0.4$ GeV/c the choice of the deuteron wave function cannot affect the identification of the color transparency effect. A simple method for studying color transparency in $dd$ collisions is also suggested based on the identification of quasi-free $pd$ interactions.