Formation of color-singlet gluon clusters and inelastic diffractive scattering - art. no. 094010

This is the extensive followup report of a recent Letter in which the exist ence of self-organized criticality (SOC) in systems of interacting soft glu ons is proposed, and its consequences for inelastic diffractive scattering processes are discussed. It is pointed out that color-singlet gluon cluster s can be formed in hadrons as a consequence of SOC in systems of interactin g soft gluons, and that the properties of such spatiotemporal complexities can be probed experimentally by examing inelastic diffractive scattering. T heoretical arguments and experimental evidence supporting the proposed pict ure are presented-together with the result of a systematic analysis of the existing data for inelastic diffractive scattering processes performed at d ifferent incident energies and/or by using different beam particles. It is shown in particular that the size and the lifetime distributions of such gl uon clusters can be directly extracted from the data, and the obtained resu lts exhibit universal power-law behaviors-in accordance with the expected S OC fingerprints. As further consequences of SOC in systems of interacting s oft gluons, the r dependence and the (M-x(2)/s) dependence of the double di fferential cross sections for inelastic diffractive scattering off a proton target are discussed. Here t stands for Four-momentum-transfer squared, M- x for the missing mass, and root s for the total c.m. system energy. It is shown that the space-time properties of the color-singlet gluon clusters du e to SOC, discussed above, lead to simple analytical formulas for d(2)sigma /dt d(M-x(2)/s) and for d sigma/dt, and that the obtained results are in go od agreement with the existing data. Further experiments are suggested.