Energy Dependence of the Contribution of Pion Exchange to Large-Rapidity-Gap Events in Deep Inelastic Scattering

Abstract

We study the energy dependence of the contribution of pion exchange to large-rapidity-gap events in deep inelastic scattering. The results show that this contribution can be quite significant at low energy and that the LRG events observed by E665 collaboration in \mu Xe and \mu D interactions at 490 $GeV$ can be reasonably well described in terms of meson exchange. We also show that the distribution of the maximum rapidity for all hadrons is quite different from that for charged hadrons only and that the former exhibits also shoulder-like structure for events at 490 $GeV$ similar to that at HERA.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, Phys. Rev. D (in press