Leading neutron spectra

Abstract

It is shown that the observation of the spectra of leading neutrons from proton beams can be a good probe of absorptive and migration effects. We quantify how these effects modify the Reggeized pion-exchange description of the measurements of leading neutrons at HERA. We are able to obtain a satisfactory description of all the features of these data. We also briefly discuss the corresponding data for leading baryons produced in hadron-hadron collisions.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures; sentence and reference added, reference corrected, to be published in EPJ