Pomeron and Odderon as direct support for the notion of color magnetic body

The following comments were inspired by a popular article"> telling about the empirical support for a particle christened Odderon. As the name tells, Odderon is not well-understood in QCD framework.

Odderon is a cousin of Pomeron which emerged already about half century ago in the so called Regge theory to explain the logarithmically rising (rather than decreasing) cross sections in proton-proton and proton-antiproton collisions. Pomeron is part of low energy phenomenology and perturbative QCD cannot say much about it. Since the charge parity is C=1 for Pomeron C=-1 for Odderon, these states are analogous to pion with spin 0 and ρ meson with spin 1.

Pomeron and Odderon have not been in the interests of the frontier of theoretical physics: they represent for an M-theorist a totally uninteresting and primitive low energy phenomenology - as all that we used to call physics before the first superstring revolution -, and does not therefore deserve the attention of an ambitious superstring theorist more interested in the marvels of brane words, landscape, swampland, and multiverse.

I have written about Pomeron for years ago. The following is something different since the view about low energy strong interactions according to TGD (see this) has developed considerably (see for instance this and this)

One can go first to Wikipedia to learn about Pomeron.

1. Pomeron exchange in the t-channel was postulated to explain the slowly (logarithmically) rising scattering cross sections in proton-proton and proton-antiproton collisions. For quarks and gluons the scattering cross sections fall down rather rapidly with energy (by dimensional argument like inverse 1/s of cm energy squared) so that something else would be in question.
2. The cross sections did not depend on the charges of the colliding baryons. The usual shower of Cerenkov radiation was missing from Pomeron exchange events. The absence of pions usually present was interpreted as absence of color charge and therefore. This suggests that quarks and gluons do not participate the Pomeron events. There is often also a large rapidity gap in which no outgoing particles are observed.
3. In the Regge theory which later was concretized in terms of the hadronic string model. Pomeron would correspond to a Regge trajectory for which the Reggeon would have quantum numbers of vacuum except for mass and angular momentum. Regge trajectory would satisfy the formula M²= M₀² =α(s) J, M mass, J angular momentum. Odderon would be Pomeron like state with an odd charge parity C=-1 instead of C=1.
4. In the QCD picture Pomeron and Odderon are assumed to be associated with the gluonic exchanges. Pomeron would be a many-gluon state.

In the many-sheeted space-time of TGD, hadrons are many-sheeted objects.

1. There is a hadronic space-time sheet and quark and gluon space-time sheets are glued to this. There is a magnetic body (MB) of hadron having a layered structure. In particular, there are em/color/weak MBs consisting of flux tubes and "tentacles", which are U-shaped flux tubes.

   Low energy hadron physics would be described in terms of reconnections of these tentacles. This is a rather new element in the picture. In a reasonable approximation, flux tubes are strings and the reconnection of closed strings appears as a basic reaction vertex for closed strings. This gives a connection with the hadronic string model. TGD indeed emerged as a generalization of the hadronic string model 43 years ago (and also as a solution of the energy problem of GRT).

2. Most of the energy of hadron is assumed to be carried by color MB: quarks and gluons carry only a small part of energy. In QCD space-time dynamics is not present and the analog of hadron as space-time surfaces would be a gluon condensate of some kind.
3. Low energy hadron reactions would consist of reconnections of the U-shaped flux tubes of the colliding color MBs. Besides this there are also the collisions of quarks and gluons having approximate description in terms of QCD. The already mentioned connection with hadronic string model suggests a connection with Regge and string model descriptions of Pomeron/Odderon.
4. Hadrons have U-shaped flux tubes acting like tentacles and reconnect to form a bridge of two flux tubes between colliding hadrons. This topological interaction mechanism would be universal and occur in all scales. In biology the ability of reacting biomolecules to magically find each other in the dense molecular soup would rely on this mechanism. It would be also a mechanism of high Tc - and biological superconductivity.

Could this explain the basic properties of the Pomeron?

1. Charge independence and absence of pion emission assignable to quark-gluon reactions can be understood. Gluons and quarks of colliding hadrons would not meet each other at all. The two colliding hadrons would just touch each other with their "tentacles" which would transfer some momentum between them in elastic collisions. This would explain the rapidity gap.
2. What about the slow dependence on collision energy? Why the cross section describing the probability of the formation of reconnection would not depend on collision energy?
   1. One could visualize the cross section in cm frame geometrically as the area of a 2-D surface cylinder parallel to the line connecting the colliding particles. The area of this cylinder would tell the probability for the formations of reconnection. If I try to touch some object in darkness, its area tells how probable the success is.
   2. In elastic scattering the t-channel momentum exchange would be orthogonal to this cylinder and have vanishing energy component. It would not change in Lorentz boosts increasing the cm collision energy. If the contribution to the cross section depends only on t, it would be independent of collision energy.

The TGD view about this finding is described in the article Some unexpected findings in hadron and nuclear physics from TGD point of view and in a chapter with the same title.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

Articles and other material related to TGD.