Nonperturbative gluon exchange in $pp$ elastic scattering at TeV energies

TL;DR

This paper models high-energy proton-proton elastic scattering using a nonperturbative two-gluon exchange approach with dynamical gluon masses, successfully fitting LHC data.

Contribution

It introduces a nonperturbative gluon propagator with a dynamical mass into the two-gluon exchange model for the Pomeron, improving data description.

Findings

The model fits LHC pp differential cross section data well.

Dynamical gluon masses from Schwinger-Dyson equations are effective.

Reggeization and proton wave function convolution are crucial for the fit.

Abstract

We investigate the two-gluon-exchange model of the Pomeron using nonperturbative gluon propagators characterized by a dynamical mass scale. We present the results for an analysis of the available $pp$ differential cross section data at TeV energies which accounts for dynamical gluon masses obtained from a non-linear version of the Schwinger-Dyson equations. We show that our two-gluon exchange model gives a very good description of the LHC data, provided we demand the Reggeization of the scattering amplitude and make a suitable choice for the convolution of proton wave functions.