The cross section of diffraction dissociation at the cern SPS collider

Abstract Single diffraction dissociation was measured in the reaction p ¯ p → p ¯ X at the centre-of-mass energy √ s = 546 GeV. The mass M of the system X was deduced from the pseudorapidity distribution of the observed charged tracks. The cross section of single diffraction dissociation for M 2 /s⩽0.05isσ sd =9.4 ± 0.7 mb. Comparison to the ISR data shows that σ sd increases with energy less fast than the total and the elastic cross sections.