Independent emission of neutral and charged clusters in high-energy hadron collisions

A general formalism for the simultaneous emission of neutral and charge clusters is considered. For application, we study in detail a typical two-component model based on cluster emissions. We parameterize the diffractive component by a πσ scheme and the nondiffractive component by a π B scheme. In the nondiffractive component, the strength parameters for the emission of both π and B are found empirically to be linear in $\ln p_{Lab}$ in reminiscence of the expectation of a multiperipheral model. Furthermore, the direct pion emission is found to dominate in the low-energy region (20-30 GeV/c), while beyond 100 GeV/c, the B emission becomes more important. This indicates that the clustering effect becomes more and more important as the energy increases. The charge multiplicity distribution and the average π⁰ multiplicity at fixed π⁻ number 〈n₀〉₋ vs n₋, predicted by the model are in good agreement with the data. Asymptotically the separation of the two components becomes noticeable at around 1000-1500 GeV/c and the prediction for 〈n₀〉₋ vs n₋ at 1500 GeV/c is essentially the same as that at 205 GeV/c. Most features enumerated here appear to be quite general properties of two-component models involving the direct independent emission of pions and other clusters, insensitive to the specific π B scheme assumed.