Nucleon-antinucleon annihilation via confined quark-gluon states

Abstract

In this work we use the quark degrees of freedom in a nucleon to calculate a nucleon-antinucleon annihilation potential. The range of this annihilation is determined by the long-range confinement forces giving the quark wave functions which also reproduce the nucleon charge radius. We find that NN¯ scattering is sensitive to the annihilation mainly between 0.5 and 2.0 fm. Our annihilation model shows that the dominant annihilation contribution to NN¯ scattering comes from qqq¯ q¯ multigluon intermediate states and that the intermediate qq¯ multigluon as well as pure gluonic states are less important for NN¯ scattering.