Color mutation model of soft interaction in high energy hadronic collisions

A comprehensive model, called ECOMB (eikonal color mutation branching), is proposed to describe multiparticle production by soft interaction. It incorporates the eikonal formalism, parton model, color mutation, branching, and recombination. The physics is conceptually opposite to the dynamics that underlies the fragmentation of a string. The partons are present initially in an hadronic collision; they form a single, large, color-neutral cluster until color mutation of the quarks leads to a fission of the cluster into two color-neutral subclusters. The mutation and branching processes continue until only $q\overline{q}$ pairs are left in each small cluster. The model contains self-similar dynamics and exhibits scaling behavior in the factorial moments. It can satisfactorily reproduce the intermittency data that no other model has been able to fit.