Soft Diffraction: a Phenomenological Survey

Abstract

The high-energy data on total, elastic and diffractive cross sections accumulated in the last decades concern mostly $\bar pp$ (starting from the ISR, which explored c.m. energies ranging from $\sqrt s \simeq 20$ GeV up to $\sqrt s \simeq 62$ GeV, and going up to the CERN SPS at $\sqrt s = 546$ GeV and to the FNAL Tevatron at $\sqrt s = 1800$ GeV). By contrast, pp has (so far) been explored only up to ISR energies, but both RHIC and LHC should, hopefully, fill the gap in the near future bringing information on the several TeV domain. All these data come from colliders. Other reactions, such as π ^± p, K ^± p, etc., have been studied only at fixed target accelerators, that is at much lower energies.