Sandy Donnachie - Böcker

The distribution of quarks within protons and neutrons, their interactions, and how they define the properties of protons, neutrons and nuclei, are subjects of major research worldwide. Written by leading experts in the field, both theoretical and experimental, this book provides an authoritative overview on the subject. The emphasis throughout the book is on phenomenology, and the book concentrates on describing the main features of the experimental data and the theoretical ideas used in their interpretation. Sections on chiral perturbation theory, crucial in understanding soft pions and soft photons near threshold, and duality ideas, equally crucial at intermediate energies, are included. This is an essential reference for graduate students and researchers in the field of particle physics and electromagnetic interactions.

This book describes the underlying ideas and modern developments of Regge theory, confronting the theory with quantum chromodynamics and a huge variety of experimental data. It covers forty years of research and provides a unique insight into the theory and its phenomenological development. The authors review experiments that suggest the existence of a soft pomeron, and give a detailed discussion of attempts at describing this through nonperturbative quantum chromodynamics. They suggest that a second, hard pomeron is responsible for the dramatic rise in energy observed in deep inelastic lepton scattering. The two-pomeron hypothesis is applied to a variety of interactions and is compared and contrasted with perturbative quantum chromodynamics, as well as with the dipole approach. This book will provide a valuable reference for experimental particle physicists all over the world. It is also suitable for graduate courses in particle physics, high-energy scattering, QCD and the standard model.