The Gluon Exchange Model for diffractive and inelastic 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.