Antibaryon production and high-energy oscillations

Abstract

We employ multiperipheral models to investigate the proposal that the experimentally observed production of antibaryons can account for most or all of the rise in the pp total cross section at ISR energies. Our models support the proposal, and furthermore predict that this rise is the first part of a long-wavelength damped oscillation as a function of energy. We find that a variety of models accommodate the antibaryon effect, and show that these all lead to total cross sections consistent with present data and displaying an oscillation at higher energies. We attempt to understant the antibaryon cross section itself within the special case of the ABFST model, and find that the observed energy threshold emerges naturally, but that the predicted magnitude is somewhat small. The oscillations are simply parametrized in terms of complex Regge poles, and one of the models studied suggests that the leading complex pole be identified with the P′.