Colloquium Detail

Measurements of Light-Cone Wavefunctions by Diffractive Dissociation

Date: 3/19/2001

Danny Ashery
Professor, Tel Aviv

The diffractive dissociation of particles at high energies can be used to study their light-cone wave functions. Results from Fermilab experiment E791 for the diffractive dissociation of 500 GeV/c pions into di-jets show that the quark -- anti-quark light-cone asymptotic wavefunction of the pion describes the data well for virtualities of order 10 (GeV/c)^2 or more. Evidence that the experimental conditions fulfilled the requirements for color transparency comes from measurement of the nuclear dependence of the yield of the diffractive di-jets. Similar studies of the light-cone wave function of other hadrons and of the photon will be discussed.