Inelastic diffractive scattering at the CERN ISR

Abstract The properties of the diffractive peak observed in the mass spectra of systems recoiling against observed high-momentum protons emerging from pp collisions at the CERN ISR have been investigated. The cross sections in this peak have been found to have a steep t dependence which flattens out as | t | increases. The high mass side of the peak varies approximately as 1/ M 2 (where M is the missing mass of the recoiling system) and scales well in terms of the variable M 2 / s . The position of the maximum has been observed to move to lower values of M 2 / s as the kinematic boundary of this variable decreases with increasing s . The measured cross sections, integrated up to M 2 / s =0.05, rise by (15±5)% over the s range 549 to 1464 GeV 2 .