Violent Collisions of Spinning Protons.pdfVIP

a r X i v : h e p - e x / 0 5 1 1 0 4 0 v 1 1 5 N o v 2 0 0 5 XIth International Conference on Elastic and Diffractive Scattering Cha?teau de Blois, France, May 15 - 20, 2005 VIOLENT COLLISIONS OF SPINNING PROTONS A.D. KRISCH Spin Physics Center, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1120 USA There will be a review of the history of polarized proton beams, and a discussion of the unexpected and still unexplained large transverse spin effects found in several high energy proton-proton spin experiments at the ZGS, AGS and Fermilab. Next, there will be a discus- sion of present and possible future experiments on the violent elastic collisions of polarized protons at IHEP-Protvino’s 70 GeV U-70 accelerator in Russia and the new high intensity 50 GeV J-PARC facility being built at Tokai in Japan. To introduce the violent collisions of spinning protons, Fig. 1 shows the proton-proton elastic scattering cross section plotted against a scaled P 2t -variable that was proposed in 1963 1 and 19672; this plot is from updates by Peter Hansen and me3,4. Notice that at small P 2t the cross- section drops off with a slope of about 10 (GeV/c)?2. Fourier transforming this slope gives the shape and size of the proton-proton interaction in the diffraction peak; it is a Gaussian with a radius of about 1 Fermi. At medium P 2t there is a component with a slope of about 3 (GeV/c) ?2; however, this component disappears rapidly with increasing energy; at lab energies of a few TeV, it has totally disappeared. Thus, one can see a sharp destructive interference between the small- P 2t diffraction peak and the large-P 2 t hard-scattering component. Since the diffraction peak is mostly diffractive, its amplitude must be mostly imaginary, as has been experimentally verified. Thus, the sharp destructive interference implies that the large-P 2t component is also mostly imaginary; thus, it is probably mostly diffractive. This large