Diffractive proteon fragmentation in 16, 32, and 110 GeV/cK ⁻ p interactions and the diffractive production of heavy quarks$(s\bar s,c\bar c)$

Abstract

The inclusive proton diffraction dissociation cross sections in 16, 32, and 110 GeV/cK ⁻ p interactions are determined from the spike nearx=1 in the inclusive negative particle spectra and are compared to those obtained inK−p interactions using other selection methods at various energies. The same procedure is applied to events containing aV ⁰ in order to obtain the cross section for diffractive$s\bar s$ production. While the total cross section for proton diffraction is found to be approximately constant in the energy range studied here, proton diffraction yielding an$s\bar s - pair$ is found to increase significantly. In particular it is almost constant at 85 μb forΛ ⁰ and Σ production but for$NK\bar K$ it rises from zero at 16 GeV.c to about 200 μb at 110 GeV/c. From the result for$s\bar s$ diffractive production an estimate for the$c\bar c$ diffractive production cross section of approximately 1–10 μb at 110 GeV/c is obtained.