Damping of forward neutrons in pp collisions

Understand

We calculate absorptive corrections to single pion exchange in the production of leading neutrons in pp collisions.

• Contrary to the usual procedure of convolving the survival probability with the cross section, we apply corrections to the spin amplitudes.
• The non-flip amplitude turns out to be much more suppressed by absorption than the spin-flip one.
• We identify the projectile proton Fock state responsible for the absorptive corrections as a color octet-octet 5-quarks configuration.