Single and Double Peripheral Production of Sigmas in Proton Proton Collisions

Abstract

The Pomeron, which dominates high energy elastic and diffractive hadronic processes, must be largely gluonic in nature. We use a recent picture of a scalar glueball/sigma system with coupling of the sigma to glue determined from experiment to predict strong peripheral sigma production in the pp$\pi^0\pi^0$ and double sigma production in the pp$\pi^0\pi^0\pi^0\pi^0$ channels.