No Arabic abstract
The QCD improved parton model is a very successful concept to treat processes in hadronic interactions, whenever large partonic transverse momenta are involved. However, cross sections diverge in the limit p_T -> 0, and the usual treatment is the definition of a lower cutoff p_T_min, such that processes with a smaller p_T -- so-called soft processes -- are simply ignored, which is certainly not correct for example at RHIC energies. A more consistent procedure amounts to introduce a technical parameter Q_0^2, referred to as soft virtuality scale, which is nothing but an artificial borderline between soft and hard physics. We will discuss such a formalism, which coincides with the improved parton model for high p_T processes and with the phenomenological treatment of soft scattering, when only small virtualities are involved. The most important aspect of our approach is that it allows to obtain a smooth transition between soft and hard scattering, and therefore no artificial dependence on a cutoff parameter should appear.
We discuss some problems concerning the application of perturbative QCD to high energy processes. In particular for hard processes, we analyze higher order and higher twist corrections. It is argued that these effects are of great importance for understanding the behaviour of pion electromagnetic form factor at moderately large momentum transfers. For soft processes, we show that summing the contributions of the lowest twist operators leads to a Regge-like amplitude.
We calculate the probability that the rapidity gaps in diffractive processes survive both eikonal and enhanced rescattering. We present arguments that enhanced rescattering, which violates soft-hard factorization, is not very strong. Accounting for NLO effects, there is no reason to expect that the black disc regime is reached at the LHC. We discuss the predictions for the survival of the rapidity gaps for exclusive Higgs production at the LHC.
The production rate and kinematic distributions of isolated photon pairs produced in hadron interactions are studied. The effects of the initial-state multiple soft-gluon emission to the scattering subprocesses q-qbar, qg, and gg to gamma gamma X are resummed with the Collins-Soper-Sterman soft gluon resummation formalism. The effects of fragmentation photons from qg to gamma q, followed by q to gamma X, are also studied. The results are compared with data from the Fermilab Tevatron collider. A prediction of the production rate and kinematic distributions of the diphoton pair in proton-nucleon reactions is also presented.
We present an overview on the current experimental and phenomenological status of transverse single spin asymmetries (tSSAs) in proton-proton collisions. In particular, we focus on large-$p_T$ inclusive pion, photon, jet, pion-jet production and Drell-Yan processes. For all of them theoretical estimates are given in terms of a generalised parton model (GPM) based on a transverse momentum dependent (TMD) factorisation scheme. Comparisons with the corresponding results in a collinear twist-3 formalism and in a modified GPM approach are also made. On the experimental side, a selection of the most interesting and recent results from RHIC is presented.
We present a consistent implementation of weak decays involving an axion or axion-like particle in the context of an effective chiral Lagrangian. We argue that previous treatments of such processes have used an incorrect representation of the flavor-changing quark currents in the chiral theory. As an application, we derive model-independent results for the decays $K^-topi^- a$ and $pi^-to e^-bar u_e a$ at leading order in the chiral expansion and for arbitrary axion couplings and mass. In particular, we find that the $K^-topi^- a$ branching ratio is almost 40 times larger than previously estimated.