pp Elastic Scattering in Near Forward Direction at LHC and Nucleon Structure

Abstract

We predict pp elastic differential cross section at LHC at the c.m. energy 14 TeV and momentum transfer range |t| = 0-10 GeV*2, which is planned to be measured by the TOTEM group. The field theory model underlying our phenomenological investigation describes the nucleon as a composite object with an outer cloud of quark-antiquark condensate, an inner core of topological baryonic charge, and a still smaller quark-bag of valence quarks. The model satisfactorily describes the asymptotic behavior of sigma-total(s) and rho(s) as well as the measured antiproton-proton elastic differential cross section at c.m. energies 546 GeV, 630 GeV, and 1.8 TeV. The large |t| elastic amplitude of the model incorporates the QCD hard pomeron (BFKL Pomeron plus next to leading order approximations), the perturbative dimensional counting behavior, and the confinement of valence quarks in a small region within the nucleon. Our predicted pp elastic differential cross section at LHC is compared with those of Bourrely et al. and Desgrolard et al.