Multipion production in diffractive hadron reactions

A hybrid model is presented in which a fireball seen as a dense set of overlapping resonances is dynamically formed and subsequently decays in cascade according to the statistical bootstrap model. Account is taken of isospin and G-parity conservation as well as of the finite widths of the produced resonances. This model allows an explicit calculation of the total density of states in a fireball. It is applied to diffractive pion dissociation on nucleon and nuclear targets for which multipion mass distributions and relative cross sections are calculated. Agreement with available experimental data is in general good. The general conclusion is that the model gives a satisfactory description of the three-pion events in the forward LPS sector and is very well suited to describe higher multiplicity diffractive phenomena. (auth)