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

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.