A Picture of Multiple-Meson Production

Abstract

High-energy hadron-hadron collisions are viewed as proceeding by a strong short-range "quark-quark" interaction, generating a "spark" in the form of a self-interacting meson field, which yields observable mesons only after the incident particles have passed. This picture leads to the possibility of rare events with high multiplicity. There is a definite contradiction to Gottfried's recent model of multiple production in nuclei, but little practical distinction for beams below 1 TeV.