Proton structure and hollowness from L\'evy imaging of $pp$ elastic scattering

TL;DR

This paper uses a novel Lévý imaging technique to analyze high-energy proton-proton elastic scattering data, revealing detailed proton structure and confirming the existence of a hollowness effect with high statistical significance at 13 TeV.

Contribution

It introduces a model-independent Lévý imaging method to extract proton structure and inelasticity profiles directly from scattering data at high energies.

Findings

Proton exhibits a hollowness or 'black-ring' structure at 13 TeV.

The inelasticity profile of the proton was reconstructed with quantified uncertainties.

The hollowness effect is statistically significant beyond 5σ at 13 TeV.

Abstract

The recently developed L\'evy imaging method enables to extract an important physics information on hadron structure at high energies and ultra-low momentum transfers directly from elastic scattering data. In this work, we employ such a model-independent method to probe the internal structure of the proton and quantify its inelasticity profile in the impact parameter space emerging in proton-proton collisions at the highest available energy of $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV. The inelasticity profile function and its error band for the proton and its substructure have been reconstructed at different energies and the proton hollowness (or "black-ring") effect with beyond 5$\sigma$ significance has been found at 13 TeV.