Production of large-transverse-momentum mesons from a meson beam

Abstract

The Landshoff-Polkinghorne quark-fusion model for the production of large-transverse-momentum mesons from high-energy hadronic processes is applied to meson-nucleon collisions. A second, leading-particle, contribution from large-angle scattering of the incident meson is included in the calculation and has the same power dependence on ${p}_{T}$ at fixed $\frac{{p}_{T}}{\sqrt{s}}$ and fixed center-of-mass scattering angle. Numerical calculations are presented for ${\ensuremath{\pi}}^{+}p\ensuremath{\rightarrow}M+X$ assuming SU(3) couplings of quarks to the pseudoscalar mesons $M$. Mainly because of the leading-particle effect, some of the cross sections are substantially higher than in proton-proton collisions. Although the over-all normalization is obtained by fitting just the quark-fusion model to the experimental data on $\mathrm{pp}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\pi}+X$ at large ${p}_{T}$, it is estimated that the choice of normalization is not substantially changed by the inclusion in this fit of the hadronic bremsstrahlung process proposed by Blandkenbecler, Brodsky, and Gunion.