Diffraction Dissociation - 50 Years Later

Abstract

The field of Diffraction Dissociation, which is the subject of this workshop, began 50 years ago with the analysis of deuteron stripping in low energy collisions with nuclei. We return to the subject in a modern context- deuteron dissociation in $\sqrt{s_{NN}}= 200$ GeV d-Au collisions recorded during the 2003 RHIC run in the PHENIX experiment. At RHIC energy, d$\to$n+p proceeds predominantly (90%) through Electromagnetic Dissociation and the remaining fraction via the hadronic shadowing described by Glauber. Since the dissociation cross section has a small theoretical error we adopt this process to normalize other cross sections measured in RHIC.