Phenomenology and Models of Strong Interactions at Very High Energies

Abstract

In these lectures I will review some of the striking observations made in high-energy multiparticle reactions at the ISR and at NAL in the past two years — observations which have an immediate impact on our understanding of the strong interactions. First, and most striking, is the confirmation of the hypothesis of short-range correlations in rapidity. Direct and convincing confirmation came from measurement of two-particle correlations at the ISR. The second observation is that of high-energy diffraction dissociation. That this process should exist was no surprise, but some features of diffractive production had to be observed before the general picture became clear. One feature is the magnitude. The question, before we saw the data, was whether diffractive production is a small or large part of multiparticle production. The first estimates of the magnitude came from fits to multiplicity distributions from NAL, where it was found from two-component models that the diffractive component is only about 20% of the inelastic cross section, whereas the short-range correlation (SRC) component is about 80%.