Elastic and Diffractive Scattering after AdS/CFT

Abstract

At high energies, elastic hadronic cross sections are believed to be dominated by vacuum exchange. In leading order of the leading $1/N_c$ expansion this exchange process has been identified as the BFKL {\em Pomeron} or its strong AdS dual the closed string graviton \cite{Brower:2006ea}. However difference of particle anti-particle cross sections are given by a so-called {\em Odderon} carrying C = -1 quantum numbers identified in weak coupling with odd numbers of exchanged gluons. Here we show that the dual description associates this with the Neveu-Schwartz ($B_{\mu\nu}$) sector of closed string theory. We also discuss the extension of the strong coupling treatment to central diffractive Higgs production at LHC.