A Quantitative Investigation of the Pomeron

Abstract

A comparative investigation of various Pomeron models is carried out through the study of their predicted values of $ \sigma_{tot}$, B, and $\frac{\sigma_{el}}{\sigma_{tot}}$ in high energy pp and p$\bar{p}$ scattering. Our results strongly support a picture of the Pomeron in which we have both moderate blackening and expansion of the p($\bar{p}$) - p amplitude in impact parameter space as a function of energy in the ISR-SSC domain. In particular, we obtain an excellent reproduction of the data with a hybrid eikonal model which combines the hard Lipatov-like QCD Pomeron with the old fashioned soft Pomeron and Regge terms. Our analysis shows that the additive quark model, at least in the naive form, is not compatible with the data.