Soft electromagnetic bremsstrahlung in inelastic hadronic collisions at high and intermediate energies

Electromagnetic bremmstrahlung in hadronic collisions has been studied extensively at low and intermediate energies. It has been found that the infrared divergent term of the cross section describes the data well up to surprisingly large photon energies. Using essentially the same soft photon approximation, we calculated the production of low mass‐low energy electron pairs via internal conversion of soft virtual bremsstrahlung accompanying the production of charged hadrons in hadron‐hadron collisions at very high and intermediate energies. The resulting electron yields explain, at least in part, the direct electrons with small transverse momenta seen a the ISR, and are in no contradiction to the rates observed at LAMPF.