Nuclear Physics B365 (1991) 3-23 N U C L E A R North-Holland P H Y S I C S B PHENOMENOLOGY OF GEOMETRICAL FLAVOUR INTERACTIONS AT TeV ENERGIES A. RINGWALD*, F. SCHREMPP and C. WETTERICH Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron-DESY, Hamburg, Germany Received 22 October 1990 (Revised 17 June 1991) We investigate the experimental signatures of the recently proposed "geometrical" produc- tion of many W, Z, Higgs and (primordial) fermions (n w= a~t = 30) with a relatively large cross section. We believe that such events, if they exist, stand a very good chance to be seen at the LHC (SSC) provided that the (parton) threshold energy for the onset of geometrical flavour production is below 11 (28) TeV. I. Introduction The similar structure of infrared divergences in QCD and QFD has led [1] to the speculation that at very high energies weak and strong interactions should behave similarly. This analogy refers not only to the production of a few particles with large transverse momenta which is well described by (parton model) perturbation theory, but also to the large, essentially constant total inelastic cross section where perturbation theory presumably fails. The central argument of ref. [1] establishes that the total weak inelastic cross section as well as suitable total multiparticle cross sections (for producing a number of weakly interacting particles greater than a certain minimal number n 0) become approximately energy-independent in the asymptotic regime at very high energies, tr w = 47rCwmw 2 . (1.1) (The quantity c w typically involves logarithms or small powers of energy.) The magnitude (cw) of the asymptotic cross section as well as the mean multiplicity in asymptotic weak inelastic scattering processes are, however, not directly determined by arguments based on the structure of infrared divergences. By analogy with QCD it was speculated that (i) Typical multiparticle cross sections are in the range 0.1 nb-10 p~- ror asymptotic parton-parton c.m. energies v~-. *Address after October 1st, 1990: CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. 0550-3213/91/$03.50 © 1991 - Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. All rights reserved