The Profile of Inelastic Collisions from Elastic Scattering Data

Abstract

Using the unitarity relation in combination with experimental data about the elastic scattering in the diffraction cone, it is shown how the shape and the darkness of the inelastic interaction region of colliding protons change with 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. Possible evolution of this shape with the dark core at the LHC to the fully transparent one at higher energies is discussed that implies that the terminology of the black disk would be replaced by the black toroid. The approach to asymptotics is disputed. The ratio of the real to imaginary parts of the nonforward elastic scattering amplitude is briefly discussed. All the conclusions are only obtained in the framework of the indubitable unitarity condition using experimental data about the elastic scattering of protons in the diffraction cone without any reference to quantum chromodynamics (QCD) or phenomenological approaches.