Abstract
Particle production in the central plateau of hadronic final states is calculated in a perturbative QCD model. We assume that the controlling process is bremsstrahlung of gluons. We find important differences between the spectrum produced in soft hadronic collisions and the spectrum in annihilation. Describing soft hadronic collisions with the Low-Nussinov model, we find that the central plateau is independent of total energy, but depends strongly on the momentum transfer in the soft-gluon exchange. In contrast, the quark jets from annihilation have a central plateau growing with energy. The strong momentum dependence in the hadron-induced plateau arises from the cancellations in the amplitude associated with the gauge invariance of the theory.
- Received 20 July 1981
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.25.746
©1982 American Physical Society