Non-linear screening effects in high energy hadronic interactions

Abstract

Non-linear effects in hadronic interactions are treated by means of enhanced pomeron diagrams, assuming that pomeron-pomeron coupling is dominated by soft partonic processes. It is shown that the approach allows to resolve a seeming contradiction between realistic parton momentum distributions, measured in deep inelastic scattering experiments, and the energy behavior of total proton-proton cross section. Also a general consistency with both ``soft'' and ``hard'' diffraction data is demonstrated. An important feature of the proposed scheme is that the contribution of semi-hard processes to the interaction eikonal contains a significant non-factorizable part. On the other hand, the approach preserves the QCD factorization picture for inclusive high p_t jet production.