Comparison of 20 exclusive reactions at large t

We report a study of 20 exclusive reactions measured at the AGS at 5.9 GeV/c incident momentum, 90^∘{} center of mass. This experiment confirms the strong quark flow dependence of two-body hadron-hadron scattering at large angle. At 9.9 GeV/c an upper limit had been set for the ratio of cross sections for (p̄p→p̄p)(pp→pp) at 90^∘{} c.m., with the ratio less than 4%. The present experiment was performed at lower energy to gain sensitivity, but was still within the fixed angle scaling region. A ratio R(p̄ppp)≈1/40 was measured at 5.9 GeV/c, 90^∘{} c.m. in comparison to a ratio near 1.7 for small angle scattering. In addition, many other reactions were measured, often for the first time at 90^∘{} c.m. in the scaling region, using beams of π^±, K^±, p, and p̄ on a hydrogen target. There are similar large differences in cross sections for other reactions: $R({{K}^{{-}}p{→}{{π}}⁺{{Σ}}^{{-}}}{{K}^{{-}}p{→}{{π}}^{{-}}{{Σ}}⁺}){≈}1/12$, for example. The relative magnitudes of the different cross sections are consistent with the dominance of quark interchange in these 90^∘{} reactions, and indicate that pure gluon exchange and quark-antiquark annihilation diagrams are much less important. The angular dependence of several elastic cross sections and the energy dependence at a fixed angle of many of the reactions are also presented.