Single and double peripheral production of sigmas in proton-proton collisions

The Pomeron, which dominates high energy elastic and diffractive hadronic processes, must be largely gluonic in nature. We use a recent picture of a scalar glueball/sigma system with coupling of the sigma to glue determined from experiment to predict strong peripheral sigma production in the ppπ⁰π⁰ and double-sigma production in the ppπ⁰π⁰π⁰π⁰ channels.