Elastic scattering and Diffractive dissociation in the light of LHC data

Understand

We study the behaviour of elastic and diffractive proton dissociation cross sections at high energy.

• First, we describe what would be expected to be observed at the LHC based on conventional Regge theory.
• We emphasize the tension between these expectations and the recent LHC measurements, and we discuss the possibilty to modify the classic Reggeon Field Theory in a physically-motivated way so as to accommodate the tendencies observed at the LHC.
• As a result, we show that we are able to achieve a `global' description of the wide variety of high energy elastic and diffractive data that are presently available, particularly from the LHC experiments.