Color transparency in hard $pd$ collisions

Abstract

As one of the predictions of perturbative QCD, the effect of color transparency has been the focus of attention in the community studying modifications of hadrons in nuclear medium for several decades. The search for this effect in reactions involving heavy nuclei can be complicated by uncertainties in nuclear characteristics (nucleon density distributions and wave functions), which can affect the interpretation of experiments. In this work, we consider the reaction $d(p,pp)n$ at $p_{\rm lab}=15$ GeV/c caused by hard elastic $pp$ scattering, in which these uncertainties are actually reduced to the behavior of the deuteron wave function at large momenta. It is shown that for transverse momenta of the spectator neutron $\leq 0.4$ GeV/c the choice of the deuteron wave function cannot affect the identification of the color transparency effect. A simple method for studying color transparency in $dd$ collisions is also suggested based on the identification of quasi-free $pd$ interactions.