Backward emitted high-energy neutrons in hard reactions of pand π+on carbon

Beams of protons and pions of 5.9 GeV/c were incident on a C target. Neutrons emitted into the back hemisphere, in the laboratory system, were detected in (triple) coincidence with two emerging p t >0.6 GeV/c particles. We present the momentum spectra of the backward going neutrons. We also integrated the spectra and determined the fraction of the hard scattering events which are in coincidence with at least one neutron emitted into the back hemisphere, with momenta above 0.32 GeV/c. Contrary to the earlier measurements which found that only a small fraction (of the order of 10%) of the total inelastic cross section for light nuclei was associated with backward going nucleons, we find that about half of the events are of this nature. We speculate that the reason for the large difference is due to the strong dependence of the hard-scattering reaction upon the total center of mass energy(s) and short range nucleon correlations in nuclei.