Double diffractive cross-section measurement in the forward region at the LHC

TOTEM, recent experimental review

The TOTEM (TOTal cross section, Elastic scattering and diffraction dissociation Measurement at the LHC) experiment, located at the interaction point 5 of the LHC, has measured the total, elastic and inelastic proton-proton crosssections, using a luminosity independent method, based on the optical theorem, in a center-of-mass energy range from 2.76 to 13 TeV. The elastic scattering was investigated in a wide range of the squared four-momentum transfer |t| allowing study of the Coulomb-nuclear interference region down to |t| ∼ 8 × 10−4 GeV2. This made possible the first measurement of the ρ parameter at √s = 13 TeV, ρ being the ratio between the real and the imaginary part of the nuclear elastic scattering amplitude at t = 0. This measurement, combined with the total crosssection results, led to the exclusion of all the models classified and published by the COMPETE Collaboration. The results obtained by TOTEM are indeed compatible with predictions of a colourless 3-gluon bound state exchange in the t-channel of proton-proton elastic scattering, as postulated by alternative theoretical models both in the Regge-like framework and in the modern QCD framework. This result has been confirmed, with a significance of 5.4σ, also by the comparison with the pp data measured by the D0 collaboration at Fermilab. In this contribution the TOTEM experiment results will be described, along with the actual experiment status, the future physics program for the LHC Run 3.

QGSJET-III model: physics and preliminary results

We discuss in some detail the physics content of the new model, QGSJET-III-01, focusing on major problems related to the treatment of semihard processes in the very high energy limit. A special attention has been payed to the main improvement, compared to the QGSJET-II model, which is related to a phenomenological treatment of leading power corrections corresponding to final parton rescattering off soft gluons. In particular, this allowed us to use a twice smaller separation scale between the soft and hard parton physics, compared to the previous model version, QGSJET-II-04. Preliminary results obtained with the new model are also presented.

Soft diffraction at LHC

This contribution reviews and compares various LHC results on soft diffraction, in particular elastic scattering, total, inelastic and elastic cross-section, single and double diffraction.