Rising total cross sections and the flavoring of the pomeron

Abstract

The relationship of the non-diffractive renormalization of the bare pomeron via K K and B B production - or its “flavoring” by λ quark loops and di-quark loops - and the shape of the NN total cross section is studied in some detail. The “unflavored” bare pomeron P̂ generated by non-strange quark loops with intercept α=0.85 is non-diffractively renormalized into the “flavored” (Gribov) bare pomeron P with intercept α above one ( α = 1.06 here). We utilize inclusive data on K K and B B production as well as inelastic diffraction to constrain parameters, and we fit the combination 1 2 (σ pp + σ p p ) from s = 10 GeV 2 through ISR energies, including the new Fermilab data, to high accuracy. No pronounced long wavelength oscillations are observed. We suggest that these data favor the Chew-Rosenzweig realization of the topological expansion over that of Harari-Freund. We show that our scheme is consistent with the rising behavior of 2 σ KN − σ πN .