Double parton scatterings in high energy hadronic collisions

CDF has recently measured a large number of double parton scatterings. The observed value of $\sigma_{eff}$, the non perturbative parameter which characterizes the process, is considerably smaller as compared with the naive expectation. The small value of $\sigma_{eff}$ is likely to be an indication of the importance of the two-body parton correlations in the many-body parton distributions of the proton.Comment: 8 pages, latex file, no figures, contributions to the proceedings of the ISMD9

Hard Inelastic Interactions at Parton and Hadron Level

In the study of multiple scattering of partons in hadron-hadron collisions the possibility of a hard inelastic process at the parton level is included in its simplest possible way, $i.e.$ including the $2 \to 3$ transition. The specific physical process to which the treatment is applied is the inelastic collision of a nucleon with a heavy nucleusComment: 4 pages, talk given at XXXI International Symposium on Multiparticle Dynamics, Sept 1-7, 2001, Datong China. URL http://ismd31.ccnu.edu.cn

Possible instability of the vacuum in a strong magnetic field

The possibility that a static magnetic field may decay through production of electron positron pairs is studied. The conclusion is that this decay cannot happen through production of single pairs, as in the electric case, but only through the production of a many-body state, since the mutual magnetic interactions of the created pairs play a relevant role. The investigation is made in view of the proposed existence of huge magnetic field strengths around some kind of neutron stars.Comment: TeX 7pages No figures. Submitted to Modern Physics letters

Incoherence and Multiple Parton Interactions

At the LHC Multiple Parton Interactions will represent an important feature of the minimum bias and of the underlying event and will give important contributions in many channels of interest for the search of new physics. Different numbers of multiple collision may contribute to the production of a given final state and one should expect important interference effects in the regime where different contributions have similar rates. We show, on the contrary, that, once multiple parton interactions are identified by their different topologies, terms with different numbers of multiple parton interactions do not interfere in the final cross section.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Collisions of protons with light nuclei shed new light on nucleon structure

The high rates of multi-parton interactions at the LHC can provide a unique opportunity to study the multi-parton structure of the hadron. To this purpose high energy collisions of protons with nuclei are particularly suitable. The rates of multi-parton interactions depend in fact both on the partonic multiplicities and on the distributions of partons in transverse space, which produce different effects on the cross section in pA collisions, as a function of the atomic mass number A. Differently with respect to the case of multi-parton interactions in pp collisions, the possibility of changing the atomic mass number provides thus an additional handle to distinguish the diverse contributions. Some relevant features of double parton interactions in pD collisions have been discussed in a previous paper. In the present paper we show how the effects of double and triple correlation terms of the multi-parton structure can be disentangled, by comparing the rates of multiple parton interactions in collisions of protons with D, Tritium and 3He.Comment: 50 pages, 13 figure

Disentangling correlations in Multiple Parton Interactions

Multiple Parton Interactions are the tool to obtain information on the correlations between partons in the hadron structure. Partons may be correlated in all degrees of freedom and all different correlation terms contribute to the cross section. The contributions due to the different parton flavors can be isolated, at least to some extent, by selecting properly the final state. In the case of high energy proton-proton collisions, the effects of correlations in the transverse coordinates and in fractional momenta are, on the contrary, unavoidably mixed in the final observables. The standard way to quantify the strength of double parton interactions is by the value of the effective cross section and a small value of the effective cross section may be originated both by the relatively short transverse distance between the pairs of partons undergoing the double interaction and by a large dispersion of the distribution in multiplicity of the multi-parton distributions. The aim of the present paper is to show how the effects of longitudinal and transverse correlations may be disentangled by taking into account the additional information provided by double parton interactions in high energy proton-deuteron collisions.Comment: 23 pages, 8 figure