Abstract

We present experimental evidences for the existence of a semi-hard scale in light hadrons. This includes the suppression of gluon radiation that is seen in high mass hadron diffraction; the weak energy dependence of hadronic total cross sections; the small value of the Pomeron trajectory slope measured in photoproduction of J / Ψ; the weakness of gluon shadowing in nuclei; shortage of gluons in the proton revealed by an unusual behavior of the proton structure function in the soft limit, and the enhanced intrinsic transverse momentum of quarks and gluons, which considerably exceeds the inverse hadronic size. All these observations suggest that gluons in hadrons are located within spots of a small size relative to the confinement radius. © 2006.