Soft diffraction within the QCD color dipole picture

Abstract

In this work we consider the QCD parton saturation models to describe soft interactions at the high energy limit. The total and elastic cross sections, as well as the elastic slope parameter, are obtained for proton-proton and pion-proton collisions and compared to recent experimental results. The analyses are done within the color dipole formalism, taking into account saturation models which have been tested against deep inelastic scattering data. The main point is that the matching between soft and hard interaction occurs in the saturation region which can be described by high density QCD approaches. Discussion is performed on the main theoretical uncertainties associated with calculations.