The diffractive component of particle production in the dual multistring fragmentation model

The single diffractive component is introduced in the dual Monte Carlo chain decay model of soft particle production. The diffractively excited multiparticle states in this model arise from the fragmentation of two chains formed out of the valence quarks and antiquarks (or diquarks) of the diffractively excited hadron and a sea quark-antiquark pair of the Pomeron, considered to be a gluonic object. In this way the excited clusters behave in a way quite similar to multiparticle states formed in nondiffractive meson-hadron collisions. The calculated multiparticle states agree quite well with recent data from the UA4-SPS collider collaboration and with recent data on strange particle production in diffractive photon-proton collisions.