Radiation-Type Eikonal Model for Uncorrelated Meson Production in High-Energy Nucleon-Nucleon Collisions

Abstract

A model for uncorrelated meson production in high-energy nucleon-nucleon collisions is proposed, using the eikonal formalism to extract a specific form for the optical potential from nucleon-nucleon elastic scattering data. This potential is used to form the eikonal wave function of the scattering system, from which is constructed a model source density for radiated pions. The normalization is derived from Adler's formulation of the soft-pion limit. Predictions involving no free parameters are compared with pion spectra from $\mathrm{pp}\to {\pi }^{+}+\mathrm{anything}$ at 12.2, 19.2, and 30 GeV/c. Good to reasonable agreement is obtained for c.m. emission angles less than 20°. The mean multiplicity for charged pions is also found to agree qualitatively with experiment. A covariant formulation of the model, using the Bethe-Salpeter equation, is proposed, but no calculations are presented.