Diffraction and unitarity

Abstract

I begin with a tribute to V.N. Gribov and then come to a particular problem which would be of interest for him. His first paper on reggeology was devoted to elastic scatterings of hadrons. Here, using the unitarity relation in combination with experimental data about the elastic scattering in the diffraction cone, I show how the shape and the darkness of the interaction region of colliding protons change with the increase of their energies. In particular, the collisions become fully absorptive at small impact parameters at LHC energies that results in some special features of inelastic processes as well. The possible evolution with increasing energy of the shape from the dark core at the LHC to the fully transparent one at higher energies is discussed. It implies that the terminology of the black disk would be replaced by the black torus.