Color mutation model of soft interaction in high energy hadronic collisions - art. no. 114023.

A comprehensive model, called ECOMB (eikonal color mutation branching), is proposed to describe multiparticle production by soft interaction. It incor porates the eikonal formalism, parton model, color mutation, branching, and recombination. The physics is conceptually opposite to the dynamics that u nderlies the fragmentation of a string. The partons are present initially i n an hadronic collision; they form a single, large, color-neutral cluster u ntil color mutation of the quarks leads to a fission of the cluster into tw o color-neutral subclusters. The mutation and branching processes continue until only q (q) over bar pairs are left in each small cluster. The model c ontains self-similar dynamics and exhibits scaling behavior in the factoria l moments. It can satisfactorily reproduce the intermittency data that no o ther model has been able to fit. [S0556-2821(99)03611-5].