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Contrary to common perceptions about systems produced in Single-Pomeron-Exchange (SPE) pp interactions, the hard diffractive process discovered at the CERN SPS-Collider leads to dominant central production of Higgs bosons at the LHC. The rate for SPE production of Higgs bosons is calculated to be 7-9 % of the total inclusive Higgs rate. In addition, an SPE measurement program of dijet events is outlined for the early days of LHC running which should answer many fundamental questions about the Pomeron structure and its effective flux factor in the proton., Comment: 14 pages, 7 Encapsulated Postscript figures, LaTex, submitted to European Phisical Journal C

One of the key experimental issues in high energy hadron physics is the extent to which data from the diffractive interaction mechanism may be described by a factorized formula which is the product of a universal term describing the probability of finding a Pomeron in a proton (loosely referred to as the "Pomeron flux-factor") and a term decribing the Pomeron's interaction with the other incident proton. In the present paper, after demonstrating that existing data on diffractive gamma*-p and pbar-p interactions show that the Pomeron flux-factor is not universal, we present the results of a new test of factorization in these interactions which does not rely on universality of the flux-factor. The test is satisfied to within ~20% for 1 < Q^2 ~ 6 GeV^2 and beta < 0.2 in the gamma*-p interactions, suggesting that the resons for non-universality of the flux-factor have a limited effect on the factorization itself. However, a clear breakdown of this test is observed at larger Q^2. Kharzeev and Levin suggest that this can be attributed to the onset of QCD evolution effects in the Pomeron's structure. The breakdown occurs in a Q^2 region which agrees with their estimates of a small Pomeron size., Comment: 20 pages, 7 Encapsulated Postscript figures, LaTex, submitted to European Phisical Journal C

We report measurements of the inclusive reaction, p pbar -> p X pbar, in events where either or both the beam-like final-state baryons were detected in Roman-pot spectrometers and the central system was detected in the UA2 calorimeter. A Double-Pomeron-Exchange (DPE) analysis of these data and single diffractive data from the same experiment demonstrates that, for central masses of a few GeV, the extracted Pomeron-Pomeron total cross section exhibits an enhancement which exceeds factorization expectations by an order-of-magnitude. This may be a signature for glueball production. The enhancement is shown to be independent of uncertainties connected with possible non-universality of the Pomeron flux factor. Based on our analysis, we present DPE cross section predictions, for unit (1 mb) Pomeron-Pomeron total cross section, at the Tevatron, LHC and the 920 GeV fixed-target experiment, HERA-B., Comment: 52 pages, 27 Encapsulated Postscript figures, 3 Tables, LaTex, Revised version as it will appear in European Physics Journal C

A further analysis of inelastic diffraction data at the ISR and SPS-Collider confirms the relatively flat s-independent pomeron trajectory in the high-|t| domain, 1-2 GeV^2, reported earlier by the UA8 Collaboration. At |t| = 1.5 GeV^2, alpha = 0.92 +/- 0.03 is in agreement with the trajectories found in diffractive photoproduction of vector mesons at HERA. This suggests a universal fixed Pomeron trajectory at high-|t|. We also show that a triple-Regge Pomeron-exchange parametrization fit to the data requires an s-dependent (effective) Pomeron trajectory intercept, alpha(0), which decreases with increasing s, as expected from unitarization (multi-Pomeron-exchange) calculations. alpha(0) = 1.10 at the lowest ISR energy, 1.03 at the SPS-Collider and perhaps smaller at the Tevatron., Comment: LATEX, 12 pages, 7 EPS figures; Revised version, as is appearing in Physics Letters. Original version was submitted by mistake to hep-ex, instead of to hep-ph

We show that a triple-Regge parametrization of inclusive single diffraction agrees with the data in the following two domains: (a) xi > 0.03 at all t, (b) |t| > 1 GeV^2 at all xi. Since the triple-Regge parametrization fails when applied to the full xi-t range of the total single-diffractive cross section, we conclude that damping occurs only at low-xi and low-|t|. We give a (``toy'') parametrization of the damping factor, D(xi), valid at low-|t|, which describes the diffractive differential cross-section (dsig/dt) data at the ISR and roughly accounts for the observed s-dependence of diffractive total cross-section up to Tevatron energies. However, an effective damping factor calculated for the CDF fitted function for dsig/dxidt at sqrt(s} = 1800 GeV and |t| = 0.05 GeV^2, suggests that, at fixed-xi, damping increases as s increases. We conjecture that, in the regions where the triple-Regge formalism describes the data and there is no evidence of damping, factorization is valid and the Pomeron-flux-factor may be universal. With the assumption that the observed damping is due to multi-Pomeron exchange, our results imply that the recent UA8 demonstration that the effective Pomeron trajectory flattens for |t| > 1 GeV$^2 is evidence for the onset of the perturbative 2-gluon pomeron. Our damping results may also shed some light on the self-consistency of recent measurements of hard-diffractive jet production cross sections in the UA8, CDF and ZEUS experiments., Comment: 19 pages, 7 Encapsulated Postscript figures, LaTex, Phys. Lett. B (in press - 1998)

We report results of inclusive measurements of anti-Lambda, produced in the forward direction at the SPS with sqrt(s) = 630 GeV, using the UA8 small angle Roman Pot spectrometers. These measurements cover the range in Feynman-x_f and transverse momentum, 0.6 < x_f < 1.0 and 0.4 < p_t < 0.7 GeV, respectively. Within a systematic uncertainty of +-20% on the absolute cross section measurements, the results are indistinguishable from those made by some of us in two earlier experiments at the CERN Intersecting Storage Rings, with energies, sqrt(s) = 53 and 62 GeV. In the x_f-range, 0.6-0.9, the absolute cross sections are lower by a factor of 2 to 3 than the predictions of the Lund model as embodied in the PYTHIA 5.6 and JETSET 7.3 Monte Carlo programs, indicating inadequacies in knowledge of the baryon fragmentation function. For the largest x_f-range, 0.9-1.0, the measurements agree with the Monte Carlo predictions. We have measured the average anti-Lambda polarization for our events and find (6 +- 12%), consistent with previous measurements at the ISR in the present region of x_f - p_t., Comment: 25 pages, 10 Encapsulated Postscript figures, LaTex, submitted to Nuclear Physics B

We report measurements of the inclusive differential cross section for the single-diffractive reactions: p + pbar --> p + X and p + pbar --> X + pbar at sqrt(s) = 630 GeV, in the momentum transfer range, 0.8 < -t < 2.0 GeV^2 and final state Feynman-x > 0.90. Based on the assumption of factorization, several new features of the Pomeron Flux Factor are determined from simultaneous fits to our UA8 data and lower energy data from the CHLM collaboration at the CERN-Intersecting Storage Rings. Prominent among these is that the effective Pomeron Regge trajectory requires a term quadratic in t, with coefficient, a'' = 0.079 +- 0.012 GeV^{-4}. We also show that the data require a Pomeron-proton cross section that first decreases with increasing diffractive mass (corresponding to the PPR term in the triple-Regge expansion) and then increases at larger mass (the PPP term), similar to real particle total cross sections. We measure the product, (K x sigma0) = 0.72 +- 0.10 mb/GeV^2, where K is the normalization constant of the Pomeron Flux Factor in the proton and sigma0 is the scale constant in the Pomeron-proton total cross section. Finally, we report the occurence of ``beam jets'' in the Pomeron direction in the rest frame of the diffractive system., Comment: 68 pages, 37 Encapsulated Postscript figures, LaTex

The UA8 experiment previously reported the observation of jets in diffractive events containing leading protons (``hard diffraction''), which was interpreted as evidence for the partonic structure of an exchanged Reggeon, believed to be the Pomeron . In the present Letter, we report the final UA8 hard-diffractive (jet) cross section results and their interpretation. After corrections, the fraction of single diffractive events with mass from 118 to 189 GeV that have two scattered partons, each with Et_jet > 8 GeV, is in the range 0.002 to 0.003 (depending on x_p). We determine the product, fK, of the fraction by which the Pomeron's momentum sum rule is violated and the normalization constant of the Pomeron-Flux-Factor of the proton. For a pure gluonic- or a pure qqbar-Pomeron , respectively: fK = 0.30 +- 0.05 +- 0.09) and (0.56 +- 0.09 +- 0.17) GeV^-2., Comment: 20 pages, 5 Encapsulated Postscript figures, LaTex, Final Version, Physics Letters B (in Pess 1998)