Near forward pp elastic scattering at LHC and nucleon structure

High energy pp and p̄p elastic scattering carried out at CERN ISR and SPS Collider and at Fermilab Tevatron are studied first in a model where the nucleon has an outer cloud and an inner core. Elastic scattering is viewed as primarily due to two processes: (a) diffraction scattering originating from cloud-cloud interaction; (b) a hard or large |t| scattering originating from one nucleon core scattering off the other via vector meson ω exchange, while their outer clouds interact independently. For small |t| diffraction dominates, but the hard scattering takes over as |t| increases. The ω-exchange amplitude shows that ω behaves like an elementary vector meson at high energy, contrary to a regge pole behavior. This behavior, however, can be understood in the nonlinear σ-model where ω couples to a topological baryonic current like a gauge boson, and the nucleon is described as a topological soliton. Further investigation shows that the underlying effective field theory model is a gauged Gell-Mann-Levy type linear σ-model that has not only the pion sector and the Wess-Zumino-Witten action of the nonlinear σ-model, but also a quark sector where quarks and antiquarks interact via a scalar field. The scalar field vanishes near the center of the nucleon, but rises sharply at some critical distance to its vacuum value f_π leading to a qq̄ condensate analogous to a BCS condensate in superconductivity. The nucleon structure that emerges then is that the nucleon has an outer cloud of qq̄ condensed ground state, an inner core of topological baryonic charge probed by ω, and a still smaller quark-bag containing massless valence quarks. Large |t| pp elastic scattering is attributed to valence quark-quark elastic scattering, which is taken to be due to the hard pomeron (BFKL pomeron with next to leading order corrections). The parameters in the model are determined by requiring that they satisfactorily describe the known asymptotic behavior of σ_tot(s) and ρ(s), and the measured pp̄ dσ/dt at √s = 546 GeV, 630 GeV, and 1.8 TeV. The model is then used to predict pp elastic differential cross-section at LHC at √s = 14 TeV and |t| = 0-10 GeV². Our predicted dσ/dt at 14 TeV is found to be very different from those predicted by the impact-picture model and the eikonalized pomeron-reggeon model. Precise measurement of dσ/dt at LHC by the TOTEM group will be able to distinguish between these models. If our predicted dσ/dt is quantitatively confirmed, then it will indicate that various novel ideas developed to describe the nucleon combine and lead to a unique physical description of its structure.