Hadronic fragmentation as a probe of the underlying dynamics of hadron collisions

Abstract

We demonstrate that measurements of the power-law behavior of single and double fragmentation cross sections ($A+B\to C+X$ and $A+B\to C+D+X$) at high energies are capable of distinguishing between different models of hadronic interactions. Present evidence supports the idea that quark exchange or annihilation is the dominant strong interaction at present energies; further tests are proposed.