Jet production via strongly interacting color-singlet exchange in pp^- collisions

A study of the particle multiplicity between jets with large rapidity separation has been performed using the D0 detector at the Fermilab Tevatron pp^¯ Collider operating at √s = 1.8 TeV. A significant excess of low-multiplicity events is observed above the expectation for color-exchange processes. The measured fractional excess is 1.07±0.10(stat)^+0.25_−0.13(syst)%, which is consistent with a strongly interacting color-singlet (colorless) exchange process and cannot be explained by electroweak exchange alone. A lower limit of 0.80% (95% C.L.) is obtained on the fraction of dijet events with color-singlet exchange, independent of the rapidity gap survival probability.