Soft Colour Interactions and Diffractive Hard Scattering at the Tevatron

We make a brief presentation of the soft colour interactions models, the Soft Colour Interaction and the Generalised Area Law, and summarise the results when they are applied to p-pbar scattering. The models give a good description of the Tevatron data on production of W, bottom and jets in diffractive events, as well as jets with two rapidity gaps, alternatively leading particles. We also give predictions for diffractive J/psi production and discuss diffractive Higgs production at the Tevatron and LHC.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, uses JHEP style. Talk presented at the International Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS HEP 2001), Budapest, 12-18 July 200

High energy DVCS on a photon and related meson exclusive production

In this work we estimate the differential cross section for the high energy deeply virtual Compton scattering on a photon target within the QCD dipole-dipole scattering formalism. For the phenomenology, a saturation model for the dipole-dipole cross section for two photon scattering is considered. Its robustness is supported by good description of current accelerator data. In addition, we consider the related exclusive vector meson production processes. This analysis is focused on the light $\rho$ and $\phi$ meson production, which produce larger cross sections. The phenomenological results are compared with the theoretical calculation using the CD BFKL approach.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures. Version to be published in Physical Review

Single molecule imaging with longer x-ray laser pulses

During the last five years, serial femtosecond crystallography using x-ray laser pulses has developed into a powerful technique for determining the atomic structures of protein molecules from micrometer and sub-micrometer sized crystals. One of the key reasons for this success is the "self-gating" pulse effect, whereby the x-ray laser pulses do not need to outrun all radiation damage processes. Instead, x-ray induced damage terminates the Bragg diffraction prior to the pulse completing its passage through the sample, as if the Bragg diffraction was generated by a shorter pulse of equal intensity. As a result, serial femtosecond crystallography does not need to be performed with pulses as short as 5--10 fs, as once thought, but can succeed for pulses 50--100 fs in duration. We show here that a similar gating effect applies to single molecule diffraction with respect to spatially uncorrelated damage processes like ionization and ion diffusion. The effect is clearly seen in calculations of the diffraction contrast, by calculating the diffraction of average structure separately to the diffraction from statistical fluctuations of the structure due to damage ("damage noise"). Our results suggest that sub-nanometer single molecule imaging with 30--50 fs pulses, like those produced at currently operating facilities, should not yet be ruled out. The theory we present opens up new experimental avenues to measure the impact of damage on single particle diffraction, which is needed to test damage models and to identify optimal imaging conditions.Comment: 23 pages; 5 figure

Soft Colour Interactions in Non-perturbative QCD

Improved understanding of non-perturbative QCD dynamics can be obtained in terms of soft colour exchange models. Their essence is the variation of colour string-field topologies giving a unified description of final states in high energy interactions. In particular, both events with and without large rapidity gaps are obtained in agreement with data from ep at HERA and ppbar at the Tevatron, where also the surprisingly large production rate of high-p_T charmonium and bottomonium is reproduced.Comment: 4 pages, contribution to PANIC 99 conference proceedings, to appear in Nucl. Phys. A. Uses espcrc1.st