Diffractive, diffusive, and statistical aspects of deep inelastic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

Deep inelastic collisions between "light" heavy ions are considered in a formalism containing diffractive, diffusive, and statistical aspects. A closed-form diffractive cross section is derived, with the deflection function being parametrized in a classically-motivated way. A statistical argument is used to demonstrate how the observed double differential cross section is built up from different diffractive contributions each with its own weight. The form of the weighting function is derived. The observed forward-peaked exponentially-decaying form of deep inelastic collision angular distributions is accounted for. The possibility of exciting a nonzero spin state is explicitly included, enabling the same formalism to be used to explain the spin polarization occurring in deep inelastic collisions. This quantity is much more sensitive than the angular distribution to the choice of deflection function parametrization. Reasonable fits to data are obtained with only one free parameter, apart from an overall normalization factor.