Observation of Color-Transparency in Diffractive Dissociation of Pions

Abstract

We have studied the diffractive dissociation into dijets of 500 GeV/c pions scattering coherently from carbon and platinum targets. Extrapolating to asymptotically high energies (where t(min)-->0), we find that when the per-nucleus cross section for this process is parametrized as sigma = sigma0Aalpha, alpha has values near 1.6, the exact result depending on jet transverse momentum. These values are in agreement with those predicted by theoretical calculations of color-transparency.