Hadron collisions at high transverse momentum

Recent experiments at the CERN ISR measuring hadron collisions at high transverse momenta (p/sub T/), show clear deviations from the sharp exponential cut-off observed at small p/sub T/. The authors show that the cross sections fall as a power of p/sub T/ as expected from point- like interactions of the hadrons, similar to those observed in electroproduction experiments. From simple parton-model calculations they estimate (in agreement with the data) that pp to pi /sup 0/+ anything falls as p/sub T//sup -8/ at constant incident energy and grows as s/sup 2/ at fixed p/sub T/. Within the same model large-angle pp elastic scattering should scale as d sigma /dt(pp to pp)=s/sup -10 /F(cos theta ). Although not conclusive, the present data strongly suggest such behavior. (12 refs)