High-energy diffraction has become a hot and fashionable subject in recent years due to the great interest triggered by the HERA and Tevatron data. These data have helped to show the field from a different perspective paving the road to a hopefully more complete understanding than hitherto achieved. The forthcoming data in the next few years from even higher energies (LHC) promise to sustain this interest for a long time. We believe that it is therefore necessary to summarize the main devel opments which have marked the growth of high-energy diffractive physics in recent decades, and to assess the present state of the art. This is the purpose of the present book, which is especially aimed at the young researchers who are entering the field and want to get acquainted with the relevant results and the main theoretical techniques. The "new" diffraction has started to bridge the gap between the hard and soft regimes of strong interactions. A modern account of the subject, in our opinion, should reflect this situation, covering both the traditional approaches to soft processes which are still alive and useful, and the modern treatment of hard dynamics in the framework of perturbative QCD. The book is divided into three parts. The first part (Chaps. 1-3) contains some introductory material: the systematics of diffractive processes, some historical remarks, the optical analogy, the eikonal approximation of quantum mechanics, and high-energy kinematics. In the second part (Chaps.

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Klappentext
This monograph gives a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of soft and hard diffraction processes in strong interaction physics. The first part covers the general formalism (the optical analogy, the eikonal picture, high-energy kinematics, S-matrix theory) and soft hadron--hadron scattering (including the Regge theory) in a complete and mature presentation. It can be used as a textbook in particle physics classes. The remainder of the book is devoted to the "new diffraction": the pomeron in QCD, low-x physics, diffractive deep inelastic scattering and related processes, jet production etc. It presents recent results and experimental findings and their phenomenological interpretations. This part addresses graduate students as well as researchers.

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. Preliminaries.- 3. Kinematics.- 4. The Relativistic S-Matrix.- 5. Regge Theory.- 6. Geometrical and s-Channel Models.- 7. Soft Diffraction: a Phenomenological Survey.- 8. The Pomeron in QCD.- 9. Deep Inelastic Scattering.- 10. Phenomenology of Hard Diffraction.- 11. Hard Diffraction in QCD.- A. Conventions.- A.1 Four-Vectors.- A.2 Sudakov Parametrization.- A.3 Reference Frames.- A.4 Fermionic States.- B. Mellin Transforms.- C. QCD Formulas.- C.2 Feynman Rules for QCD.- References.