Soft particle production and QCD coherence

Abstract

We discuss the behaviour of the energy spectrum of particles in jets near the limit of small momenta of a few hundred MeV. In QCD parton cascades the soft gluons are coherently emitted from all faster partons in the jet and their production rate is predicted to scale. The observed charged and identified particle spectra follow this behaviour surprisingly well supporting of the hypothesis of the Local Parton Hadron Duality (LPHD) for this extreme limit. Further tests of this perturbative approach are discussed.

LaTeX2e, 12 pages, 4 figures, uses sprocl.sty and epsfig.sty, to appear in the Proc. of the 7th International Workshop ``Correlations and Fluctuations'' (Nijmegen, the Netherlands, June 30-July 6, 1996)