Baryon stopping in high energy collisions and the extrapolation of hadron production models to Cosmic Ray energies

Abstract

A new striking feature of hadron production in nuclear collisions is the large stopping of the participating nucleons in hadron-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions. This enhanced baryon stopping can be understood introducing new diquark breaking mechanisms in multistring models of hadron production. Here we show, that similar diquark breaking mechanisms occur at high energy even in hadron-hadron collisions. This effect leads to significant changes in the extrapolation of these models to Cosmic Ray energies.Comment: 18 pages, LATEX using revtex.sty, 21 postscript figure