Geometric branching model of high-energy hadron-hadron collisions

A phenomenological model is proposed to describe collisions between hadrons at high energies. In the context of the eikonal formalism, the model consists of two components: soft and hard. The former only involves the production of particles with small transverse momenta; the latter is characterized by jet production. Geometrical scaling is taken as an essential input to describe the geometrical properties of hadrons as extended objects on the one hand, and on the other to define the soft component in both regions below and above the jet threshold. A stochastical Furry branching process is adopted as the mechanism of soft particle production, while the jet fragmentation and gluon initial-state bremsstrahlung are for the production of hadrons in hard collisions. Impact parameter and virtuality are smeared to describe the statistical averaging effects of hadron-hadron collisions. Many otherwise separated issues, ranging from elastic scattering to parton decay function, are connected together in the framework of this model. The descriptions of many prominent features of hadronic collisions are in good agreement with the observed experimental data at all available energies. Multiplicity distributions at all energies are discussed as a major issue in this paper. KNO scaling is achieved for energies within ISR range. The emergence of jets is found to be responsible not only for the violation of both geometrical scaling and KNO scaling, but also for the continuous broadening of the multiplicity distribution with ever increasing energy. It is also shown that the geometrical size of a hadron reaches an asymptote in the energy region of CERN-SppS. A Monte Carlo version of the model for soft production is constructed