Experimenting with the Pomeron

Experimenting with the Pomeron

Peter Schlein, UCLA

1998 is the 10th anniversary of the UA8 publication which demonstrated that the Pomeron exhibits a partonic structure in hard-diffractive interactions. Four years earlier, Gunnar Ingelman and I had proposed to look for these effects in diffractive proton-antiproton and electron-proton collisions with leading protons). Subsequently, the structure of the Pomeron was found to be hard, and sometimes even "super-hard", when most or all of its momentum participates in the hard scattering. "Hard Diffractive Scattering" is now a well-established component of all large collider experiments.

More recent work has concentrated on a determination of the Pomeron flux factor in the proton using all available single diffractive data from the ISR to Tevatron. In the course of this work, we have found a pronounced flattening of the Pomeron Regge trajectory for -t > 1 GeV2, which may be due to the onset of the perturbative 2-gluon Pomeron. We also find that damping or screening effects due to multiple Pomeron exchange are confined to small momentum transfer (-t < 1 GeV2) and small momentum fraction of the Pomeron (xi < 0.03). At larger t and xi, the triple-Regge parametrization is in agreement with the data and the flux factor may be universal.

Most recently, we have used our knowledge of the flux factor to obtain the Pomeron-Pomeron total cross section, where we find a substantial enhancement in the few GeV region. This may be due to glueball production, although our experimental mass resolution of 1.8 GeV does not permit us to observe structure.