No Arabic abstract
The energy dependence of the cross sections for electromagnetic diffractive processes can be well described by a single power, $W^delta$. For $J/psi$ photoproduction this holds in the range from 20 GeV to 2 TeV. This feature is most easily explained by a single pole in the angular momentum plane which depends on the scale of the process, at least in a certain range of values of the momentum transfer. It is shown that this assumption allows a unified description of all electromagnetic elastic diffractive processes. We also discuss an alternative model with an energy dependent dipole cross section, which is compatible with the data up to 2 TeV and which shows an energy behaviour typical for a cut in the angular momentum plane.
We test the hypothesis that diffractive scattering in the perturbative and non-perturbative domain is determined by the exchange of a single pomeron with a scale dependent trajectory. Present data on diffractive vector meson production are well compatible with this model and recent results for $J/psi$ photoproduction at LHC strongly support it. The model is inspired by concepts of gauge/string duality applied to the pomeron.
We review the evolution of the studies of diffractive processes in the strong interaction over the last 60 years. First, we briefly outline the early developments of the theory based on analyticity and unitarity of the S-matrix, including the derivation and exploration of the Regge trajectories and related moving cuts. Special attention is paid to the concept of the Pomeron trajectory introduced for description of total, elastic and diffractive cross sections at high energies and to the emergence of the dynamics of multi-Pomeron interactions.The role of large longitudinal distances and color coherent phenomena for the understanding of inelastic diffraction in hadron-hadron scattering and deep inelastic scattering is emphasized. The connection of these phenomena to the cancellation of the contribution of the Glauber approximation in hadron-nucleus collisions and to the understanding of the Gribov-Glauber approximation is explained. The presence of different scales in perturbative QCD due to masses of heavy quarks has led to the emergence of numerous new phenomena including non-universality of the slopes of Regge trajectories made of light and heavy quarks and non-universal energy dependence of elastic cross sections. The application of the perturbative QCD techniques allowed us to calculate from the first principles the interaction of small transverse size color singlets with hadrons leading to the development of the quantitative theory of hard exclusive reactions and to the successful prediction of many regularities in hard large mass diffraction. It also led to the prediction of the phenomenon of complete transparency of nuclear matter in QCD in special processes. The conflict of perturbative QCD with probability conservation for high energy processes of virtual photon-nucleon scattering is explained. Some properties of the new QCD regime are outlined.
In view of the numerous experimental results recently released, we provide in this letter an update on the performance of our simple Regge model for strangeness electroproduction on the nucleon. Without refitting any parameters, a decent description of all measured observables and channels is achieved. We also give predictions for spin transfer observables, recently measured at Jefferson Lab which have high sensitivity to discriminate between different theoretical approaches.
Exclusive diffractive production of real photons and vector mesons in ep collisions has been studied at HERA in a wide kinematic range. Here we present and discuss a Regge-type model of real photon production (Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering), as well as production of vector mesons (VMP) treated on the same footing by using an extension of a factorized Regge-pole model proposed earlier. The model has been fitted to the HERA data. Despite the very small number of the free parameters, the model gives a satisfactory description of the experimental data, both for the total cross section as a function of the photon virtuality Q2 or the energy W in the center of mass of the gammastar-p system, and the differential cross sections as a function of the squared four-momentum transfer t with fixed Q2 and W.
After a brief historical survey, the paper introduces the notion of entropic model sets (cut and project sets), and, more generally, the notion of diffractive point sets with entropy. Such sets may be thought of as generalizations of lattice gases. We show that taking the site occupation of a model set stochastically results, with probabilistic certainty, in well-defined diffractive properties augmented by a constant diffuse background. We discuss both the case of independent, but identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables and that of independent, but different (i.e., site dependent) random variables. Several examples are shown.