Partonic description of soft high energy pp interactions

Understand

We discuss how the main features of high-energy `soft' and `semihard' pp collisions may be described in terms of parton cascades and multi-Pomeron exchange.

• The interaction between Pomerons produces an effective infrared cutoff, k_sat, by the absorption of low k_t partons.
• This provides the possibility of extending the parton approach, used for `hard' processes, to also describe high-energy soft and semihard interactions.
• We outline a model which incorporates these features.