Wide-angle exclusive hadronic interactions at 6 GeV/c incident momentum

A well understood, versatile apparatus at the Brookhaven National Laboratory has been used to measure exclusive interactions at 90 degree in the center of mass frame. A 6 GeV/c, high intensity, secondary beam of positive and negative pions, kaons and protons was incident on a liquid hydrogen target. The high sensitivity of this experiment allowed the differential cross sections for 18 two-body, exclusive reactions to be measured in the same apparatus. In the perturbative QCD picture, the final states are produced through various combinations of gluon exchange, quark interchange, and quark-antiquark annihilation and pair creation diagrams. These high statistics measurements have confirmed the conclusion of a previous 10 GeV/c experiment which found that the relative magnitudes of the cross sections are consistent with the dominance of the quark interchange diagram