Eur. Phys. J. C (2013) 73: 2630
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-013-2630-4

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Interpretation of the measurements of total, elastic, and diffractive cross sections at LHC

¹ INFN sezione Roma “La Sapienza”, Rome, Italy
² Dipartimento di Fisica and sezione INFN, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Rome, Italy

^* e-mail: maurizio.lusignoli@roma1.infn.it

Received: 26 June 2013
Revised: 7 October 2013
Published online: 5 November 2013

Abstract

Recently at LHC one has obtained measurements of the total, elastic, and diffractive cross sections in pp collisions at very high energy. The total cross section is in good agreement with predictions based on a leading behavior σ _tot(s)∝(lns/s ₀)², on the other hand the elastic cross section is lower than most expectations and the diffractive cross section is higher. It is remarkable that the ratio (σ _el+σ _diff)/σ _tot calculated combining the results of the TOTEM and ALICE detectors is , very close to the maximum theoretically allowed value of 1/2 known as the Miettinen–Pumplin bound. In this work we discuss these results using the frameworks of single- and multi-channel eikonal models, and we outline the main difficulties for a consistent interpretation of the data.