A model of diffractive dissociation is proposed in which these reactions are regarded as occurring through two stages: (i) coherent excitation of one (or both) of the incident particles as a whole, and (ii) subsequent decay of the excited states which occurs independently of (i). This assures the observed constancy of the average multiplicity of the dissociated systems $〈n〉$ as a function of the four-momentum transfer $t$. With an additional assumption of an extended-particle eikonal approximation in (i) and a statistical hypothesis in (ii), the model describes satisfactorily all the essential features of diffractive dissociation.

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