Proton structure and hollowness from Lévy imaging of pp elastic scattering

Abstract

Abstract The recently developed Lévy imaging method enables to extract an important physics information on hadron structure at high energies and ultra-low momentum transfers directly from elastic scattering data. In this work, we employ such a model-independent method to probe the internal structure of the proton and quantify its inelasticity profile in the impact parameter space emerging in proton-proton collisions at the highest available energy of $$\sqrt{s} = 13$$ s=13 TeV. The inelasticity profile function and its error band for the proton and its substructure have been reconstructed at different energies and the proton hollowness (or “black-ring”) effect with beyond 5$$\sigma $$ σ significance has been found at 13 TeV.