Color Transparency in Hard pd Collisions

Abstract

As one of the predictions of perturbative quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the effect of color transparency has been the focus of attention in the community studying the modifications of hadrons in a nuclear medium for several decades. The search for this effect in reactions on 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 paper, we consider the \(d(p,pp)n\) reaction at \({{p}_{{{\text{lab}}}}} = 15\) GeV/c due to hard elastic \(pp\) scattering, in which these uncertainties are actually reduced to deuteron wave function behavior at high momenta. It is shown that, for transverse momenta of the spectator neutron below 0.4 GeV/c, the choice of a deuteron wave function cannot influence the identification of color transparency effect. A simple method of studying the color transparency in \(dd\) collisions via the identification of quasi-free \(pd\) interactions is proposed.