Thrust Jet Analysis of Deep-Inelastic Large-Rapidity-Gap Events

TL;DR

This study analyzes large-rapidity-gap events in deep-inelastic ep collisions, revealing a dominant 2-jet topology and challenging some existing models, with results consistent with qqbarg configurations.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed thrust analysis of large-rapidity-gap events in deep-inelastic scattering, highlighting the role of qqbarg configurations over soft colour exchange models.

Findings

Thrust increases with hadronic mass MX, indicating 2-jet dominance.

Thrust decreases with increasing transverse momentum Pt.

Data align with qqbarg configurations, not soft colour exchange models.

Abstract

A thrust analysis of Large-Rapidity-Gap events in deep-inelastic ep collisions is presented, using data taken with the H1 detector at HERA in 1994. The average thrust of the final states X, which emerge from the dissociation of virtual photons in the range 10 < Q2 < 100 GeV2, grows with hadronic mass M_X and implies a dominant 2-jet topology. Thrust is found to decrease with growing Pt, the thrust jet momentum transverse to the photon-proton collision axis. Distributions of Pt2 are consistent with being independent of MX. They show a strong alignment of the thrust axis with the photon-proton collision axis, and have a large high-Pt tail. The correlation of thrust with MX is similar to that in e+e- annihilation at sqrt(see)=MX, but with lower values of thrust in the ep data. The data cannot be described by interpreting the dissociated system X as a qqbar state but inclusion of a substantial fraction of qqbarg parton configurations leads naturally to the observed properties. The soft colour exchange interaction model does not describe the data.