CGC/saturation approach for soft interactions at high energy: a two channel model

In this paper we continue the development of a model for strong interactions at high energy, based on two ingredients: the CGC/saturation approach and the BFKL Pomeron. In our approach, the unknown mechanism of confinement of quarks and gluons is characterized by several numerical parameters, which are extracted from the experimental data. We demonstrate that the two channel model successfully describes the experimental data, including both the value of the elastic slope and the energy behavior of the single diffraction cross section. We show that the disagreement with the experimental data of our previous single channel eikonal model (Gotsman et al., Eur Phys J C 75:1–18, 2015) stems from the simplified approach used for the hadron structure and is not related to our principal theoretical input, based on the CGC/saturation approach.