We make some educated guesses for the extrapolations of typical soft-inclusive (minimum-bias, pileup, underlying-event) observables to proton-proton collisions at center-of-mass energies in the range 13 - 100 TeV. The numbers should be interpreted with (at least) a 10% uncertainty.
The hadron inclusive spectra in pp collisions at high energies are analyzed within a soft QCD model, namely the quark-gluon string model. In addition to the sea quark distribution in the incoming proton we consider also the unintegrated gluon distribution that has an increasing behaviour when the gluon transverse momentum grows. It leads to an increase of the inclusive spectra of hadrons and their multiplicity in the central rapidity region of pp collision at LHC energies.
In this Snowmass White Paper, we discuss physics opportunities involving heavy quarkonia at the intensity and energy frontiers of high energy physics. We focus primarily on two specific aspects of quarkonium physics for which significant advances can be expected from experiments at both frontiers. The first aspect is the spectroscopy of charmonium and bottomonium states above the open-heavy-flavor thresholds. Experiments at e^+ e^- colliders and at hadron colliders have discovered many new, unexpected quarkonium states in the last 10 years. Many of these states are surprisingly narrow, and some have electric charge. The observations of these charged quarkonium states are the first definitive discoveries of manifestly exotic hadrons. These results challenge our understanding of the QCD spectrum. The second aspect is the production of heavy quarkonium states with large transverse momentum. Experiments at the LHC are measuring quarkonium production with high statistics at unprecedented values of p_T. Recent theoretical developments may provide a rigorous theoretical framework for inclusive production of quarkonia at large p_T. Experiments at the energy frontier will provide definitive tests of this framework. Experiments at the intensity frontier also provide an opportunity to understand the exclusive production of quarkonium states.
An analysis of p-air cross section data from Extensive Air Shower (EAS) measurements is presented, based on an analytical representation of the pp scattering amplitudes that describes with high precision all available accelerator data at ISR, SPS and LHC energies. The theoretical basis of the representation, together with the very smooth energy dependence of parameters controlled by unitarity and dispersion relations, permits reliable extrapolation to high energy cosmic ray and asymptotic energy ranges. Calculations of the p-air production cross section based on Glauber formalism are made using the input values of the pp forward scattering parameters at high energies, with attention given to the independence of the real and imaginary slope parameters. The influence of contributions of diffractive intermediate states, according to Good-Walker formalism, is examined. The comparison with cosmic ray data is very satisfactory in the whole pp energy interval from 1 to 100 TeV. High energy asymptotic behavior of p-air cross sections is investigated in view of the geometric scaling property of the pp amplitudes. The observed energy dependence of the ratio between p-air and pp cross sections in the data is shown to be related to the nature of the pp cross section at high energies, that does not agree with the black disk image.
Neutrino masses are clear evidence for physics beyond the standard model and much more remains to be understood about the neutrino sector. We highlight some of the outstanding questions and research opportunities in neutrino theory. We show that most of these questions are directly connected to the very rich experimental program currently being pursued (or at least under serious consideration) in the United States and worldwide. Finally, we also comment on the state of the theoretical neutrino physics community in the U.S.
A phenomenological model for the description of the single and double diffractive excitation in $pp$ collisions at high energies is presented. Considering the Good -- Walker approach, we propose a model for the eigenstates of the scattering operator and for the treatment of the interaction between them, with the high energy behavior of the cross section driven by perturbative QCD. The behavior of the total, elastic, single and double diffractive cross sections are analyzed and predictions for the energies of Run 3 of the LHC and those of the Cosmic Rays experiments are derived. We demonstrate that the model describes the current data for the energy dependence of the cross sections. A comparison with the recent data for the $rho$ parameter and the differential elastic cross section are also presented and shortcomings of the current model are discussed.