  An improved understanding of nonperturbative QCD can be obtained by the
recently developed soft color interaction models. Their essence is the
variation of color string-field topologies, giving a unified description of
final states in high energy interactions, e.g., diffractive and nondiffractive
events in ep and ppbar. Here we present a detailed study of such models (the
soft color interaction model and the generalized area law model) applied to
ppbar, considering also the general problem of the underlying event including
beam particle remnants. With models tuned to HERA ep data, we find a good
description also of Tevatron data on production of W, beauty and jets in
diffractive events defined either by leading antiprotons or by one or two
rapidity gaps in the forward or backward regions. We also give predictions for
diffractive J/psi production where the soft exchange mechanism produces both a
gap and a color singlet ccbar state in the same event. This soft color
interaction approach is also compared with Pomeron-based models for
diffraction, and some possibilities to experimentally discriminate between
these different approaches are discussed.
