Studies of Diffractive Enhanced Minimum Bias Events in ATLAS

While charged particle multiplicities in non-diffractive events have been studied in great detail both at the Tevatron and the LHC, there is comparatively little information about the diffractive component of the inelastic cross section. In this note we select a sample of events at sqrt(s)=7 TeV enhanced in diffractive interactions by selecting events that have hits on exactly one side of the Minimum Bias Trigger Scintillator detector of ATLAS. We study the rate of such events with respect to events that have hits on either side. Furthermore we study the multiplicity, $eta$ and $p_T$ distributions of tracks in this sample and compare it to simulated Monte Carlo events from the {sc Pythia6}, {sc Phojet} and {sc Pythia8} generators which have been passed through the ATLAS simulation. The analysis is not corrected for experimental effects due to detector or reconstruction inefficiencies or mismeasurements.