High-transverse-momentum secondaries and rising total cross sections in cosmic-ray interactions

The authors draw attention to hadron collisions from cosmic-ray data showing evidence for high-transverse-momentum secondaries in substantial excess of the celebrated exponential cutoff, analogous to recent observations at the CERN intersecting storage rings. The data support a composite (parton/quark) picture of the proton in which deep inelastic proton collisions at high energy ( approximately 10/sup 3/ GeV) produce constituents, observed through hadron jets. This phenomenon is possibly connected to the rise of the total cross section observed in the same range of energy. (24 refs).