Pion Fusion in Peripheral $pp$ Collisions

Abstract

We estimate the cross section for quasi-elastic double pion exchange in high energy proton-proton collisions. Total and elastic $\pi \pi$ cross sections are calculated in an equivalent pion approximation, with pion-baryon vertices taken from chiral perturbation theory.

Comments: 11 pages. uuencoded postscript; contributions of pi-rho and rho-rho fusion added