Evidence of Odderon-exchange from scaling properties of elastic scattering at TeV energies

Abstract

Abstract We study the scaling properties of the differential cross section of elastic proton–proton (pp) and proton–antiproton ( $$p\bar{p}$$ p p ¯ ) collisions at high energies. We introduce a new scaling function, that scales – within the experimental errors – all the ISR data on elastic pp scattering from $$\sqrt{s} = 23.5$$ s = 23.5 –62.5 GeV to the same universal curve. We explore the scaling properties of the differential cross-sections of the elastic pp and $$p\bar{p}$$ p p ¯ collisions in a limited TeV energy range. Rescaling the TOTEM pp data from $$\sqrt{s} = 7$$ s = 7 TeV to 2.76 and 1.96 TeV, and comparing it to D0 $$p\bar{p}$$ p p ¯ data at 1.96 TeV, our results provide an evidence for a t-channel Odderon exchange at TeV energies, with a significance of at least 6.26 $$\sigma $$ σ . We complete this work with a model-dependent evaluation of the domain of validity of the new scaling and its violations. We find that the H(x) scaling is valid, model dependently, within $$200~\hbox {GeV}\le \sqrt{s} \le 8$$ 200 GeV ≤ s ≤ 8 TeV, with a $$-t$$ - t range gradually narrowing with decreasing colliding energies.