Hadron production at supercolliders in the two component dual parton model and the smallx behaviour of the structure functions

Abstract

Models which contain a semihard component sensitively depend on the smallx region of the structure functions. Within the framework of a two component dual parton model the effect of recently proposed steeper structure functions is investigated. Drastic changes which appear in the bare scattering amplitudes get significantly reduced by unitarization. For presently available energies the semihard component seems still too small to allow for clear cut conclusions about the correctness of the various proposed structure functions. However, the predictions for SSC or LHC energies depend on the choice of the structure function quite decisively, resulting in a substantial uncertainty in the extrapolations. The uncertainty is reduced to a less worrisome level if the consideration is restricted to the strongly shadowed parton distribution.