Diffractive baryon production and the relation between reggeon and photon couplings

The authors illustrate how one can employ the γ-analogy hypothesis, introduced in a previous paper, which relates the couplings of the leading natural-parity reggeon exchanges, P, f and ω, to those of the isoscalar part of the photon. It enables the prediction of the differential cross sections for the diffractive processes pp→pN*(5/2+,1688), N*(3/2-,1520), and N*(7/2-,2190) starting from Regge fits to pp elastic scattering, with just a single free parameter in each case. This success stems from an intimate relation between electromagnetic and hadronic couplings demanded by duality, scaling and vector dominance. Dips due to pole-cut interference in the N* production differential cross sections are not expected because of their more complicated helicity structure. (Auth.)