Color screening, absorption, and σ tot pp at LHC

Abstract

We show that a growth of the proton-proton total cross section with energy can be entirely attributed to the purely perturbative mechanism. The infrared regularization at rather short distances, $R_c\simeq 0.3$ fm, allows to extend the BFKL technique from deep inelastic to hadron-hadron scattering. With the account of the absorption corrections our results are in agreement with the LHC data on $\sigma_{tot}^{pp}$.