We discuss the infrared limit for soft gluon kt-resummation and relate it to physical observables such as the intrinsic transverse momentum and the high energy limit of total cross-sections.
We study soft gluon kt-resummation and the relevance of zero momentum gluons for the energy dependence of total hadronic cross-sections. We discuss a model in which consistency of the energy dependence of the cross-section with the limitation of the
Froissart bound, is directly related to the behaviour of the strong coupling constant in the infrared region. Our predictions for the asymptotic behaviour are shown to be related to the ansatz that the infrared behaviour of the QCD strong coupling constant follows an inverse power law.
In this paper we apply to photoproduction total cross-section a model we have proposed for purely hadronic processes and which is based on QCD mini-jets and soft gluon re-summation. We compare the predictions of our model with the HERA data as well a
s with other models. For cosmic rays, our model predicts substantially higher cross-sections at TeV energies than models based on factorization but lower than models based on mini-jets alone, without soft gluons. We discuss the origin of this difference.
