Inelastic diffractive-dissociation cross section inπ−pinteractions at 200 GeV/c

For nondiffractive ${\pi }^{-}p$ interactions at high energy we find that the dependence of the cross section on charge multiplicity in each c.m. hemisphere exhibits Koba-Nielsen-Olesen scaling. We use this behavior to extract a cross section for diffractive excitation of 3.4±0.2 mb at 200 GeV/c. We attribute ∼55% of this to pion excitation, with a mean breakup charge multiplicity of ∼2.9, ∼30% to proton excitation, with mean charge multiplicity ∼2.2 and ∼15% to double excitation. We believe this technique is widely applicable for extracting the diffractive component in hadronic interactions.