Pomeron

In physics, the Pomeron is a force-carrying pseudo-particle postulated in 1961 to explain energy behavior of soft hadronic collisions at high energies. It appeared first in the framework of the phenomenological Regge theory of strong interactions at high energies, but later a similar object was derived from the first principle QCD calculations.

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The existence of the pomeron as well as some of its properties have been reasonably well established experimentally, notably at Fermilab. In particular, it is believed that the pomeron carries no net charges. The absence of electric charge implies that pomeron exchange does not lead to the usual shower of Cherenkov radiation, while the absence of color charge implies that such events do not radiate pions.

This is in accord with experimental observation. In high energy proton-antiproton collisions in which it is believed that pomerons have been exchanged, a rapidity gap is often observed. This is a large angular region in which no outgoing particles are detected.

The name honors the Ukrainian physicist Isaak Pomeranchuk for his theoretical work in 1960's on high-energy scattering.