Effective fire tube and geometric scaling in proton-proton and proton-antiproton collisions

A simple phenomenological model for the proton-proton process used earlier is developed. The model combines a fireball formation process via the string fragmentation mechanism for the spacetime development of a nonperturbative fire tube of an excited vacuum, with subsequent final-hadron production through fireball decays. The effective string tension is proportional to the fire-tube transversal area determined by the overlap area of the two colliding protons. The overlap area is a function of the impact parameter and the proton-proton total cross section. Excellent agreement with experimental data is obtained for a wide energy range covering from √s ∼20 GeV to 1 TeV