The proton inelastic cross section at ultrahigh energies

TL;DR

This paper compares two unitarisation schemes, eikonal and U-matrix, for modeling proton-proton and proton-antiproton scattering at ultrahigh energies, finding nearly identical predictions up to EeV energies.

Contribution

It demonstrates that different unitarisation schemes yield similar predictions for scattering cross sections at energies up to EeV, highlighting their robustness.

Findings

Predictions from both schemes agree up to EeV energies.

Differences between schemes become significant only at GUT-scale energies.

High-energy collider data constrains scattering models effectively.

Abstract

We study the consequences of high-energy collider data on the best fits to total, elastic, and inelastic cross sections for $pp$ and $p\bar{p}$ scattering using two very distinct unitarisation schemes: the eikonal and the $U$-matrix. Despite their analytic differences, we find that the two schemes lead to almost identical predictions up to EeV energies, with differences only becoming significant at GUT-scale and higher energies.