How transparent are hadrons to pions?

Abstract

The scattering of hadrons at high energies can be described by a distribution function of cross sections, which incorporates the phenomena of color transparency and color opacity. We infer here a cross-section distribution for pionic projectiles on nucleons consistent with the data on the moments of the distribution. Using this distribution we calculate the probability for a pion to be in a pointlike configuration and compare with predictions based on a combination of perturbative QCD and QCD sum rules. Comparison with the corresponding distribution for nucleon-nucleon scattering shows that color transparency effects should be more pronounced for a meson beam.