The Behavior of Hadron Collisions at Extreme Energies

Abstract

There are several reasons to be interested in this problem of very high energy hadron scattering. Firstly, most theoretical inventions are based on analysis of simple collisions, in which only a small number of particles come out. But it is at once realized that questions of unitarity, the asymptotic behavior for high energy in dispersion integrals, etc, require some ansatz be made for the higher energy collisions, in order to close the infinite hierarchy of equations which result. Secondly, experiments at high energies usually yield many particles, and only by selecting the rare collision can we find those about which the theorist has been speaking. For the highly multiple inelastic collisions (to which the major part of the inelastic cross section is due) so many variables are involved that it is not known how to organize or present this data. Any theoretical suggestion (even if it proves to be not quite right) suggests a way that this vast amount of data may be analyzed. For this reason I shall present here some preliminary speculations on how these collisions might behave even though I have not yet analyzed them as fully as I would like.