High-energy hadron-hadron collisions and internal hadron structure

As shown by many authors, central particle emission in pp collisions at centre-of-mass energies ? 20 GeV can be described in terms of independent cluster production. In ref. 1] this process has been related to the quark-gluon picture of nucleon structure. The present paper carries this relation further and links the leading particle spectrum of non-diffractive hadron-hadron collisions to the x distribution of quarks in the hadron. Thus, the flat leading particle spectrum, as observed in non-diffractive pp collisions, is found to be naturally related to the steeply falling x distribution of quarks in the nucleon, as deduced from the structure functions measured in deep inelastic scattering of electrons and neutrinos on nucleons. Our analysis is extended to meson-nucleon collisions and leads to a prediction of the general shape of the quark x distribution in a meson.