General laws of hadron scattering at very high energies

Abstract

We review the general properties of particle scattering at extremely high energy and fixed momentum transfer, concentrating on features which can be derived from analyticity, crossing symmetry, unitarity and other general principles. The progress since 1973 is reported; it is pointed out that the rigorous approach yields fairly tight high-energy correlations between the phase and the modulus of the crossing-even as well as the crossing-odd forward scattering amplitude, without assuming any particular model of the interaction mechanism. The approach becomes particularly predictive when the formalism is supplemented by the phenomenological assumption that the total cross section rises unboundedly at high energies. Relation of the results to existing hadron-hadron scattering data and to future experiments is discussed.