Massive hadron pair production by 800-GeV/c protons on nuclear targets.

We report data on proton-nucleon collisions obtained on Fermilab experiment E711, in which high transverse momentum hadrons are produced near 90° in the proton-nucleon center of mass forming high mass states, using an 800 GeV/c proton beam on targets of beryllium, aluminum, iron, and tungsten. The data presented cover the mass range from 7 to 15 GeV/c2, the three dihadron charge states ++, +-, and --, and parton-parton scattering angles up to cosθ*=0.50. We present the differential mass dihadron cross section, as well as the angular and charge dependence of the measurement. The cross section as a function of the parton-parton scattering angle for the three charge states is shown to vary linearly with the value of the atomic weight. While the angular distributions are shown to be independent of the target type, a small dependence on the charge state of the distributions is observed. The data are shown to be in good agreement with extrapolations from previous measurements and phenomenological QCD calculations.