Fresh look at experimental evidence for odderon exchange

Theory suggests that in high-energy elastic hadron+hadron scattering, t-channel exchange of a family of colourless crossing-odd states - the odderon - may generate differences between pp over bar and pp cross -sections in the neighbourhood of the diffractive minimum. Using a mathematical approach based on interpolation via continued fractions enhanced by statistical sampling, we develop robust comparisons between pp over bar elastic differential cross-sections measured at root s = 1.96 TeV by the D0 Collaboration at the Tevatron and function-form-unbiased extrapolations to this energy of kindred pp measurements at root s/TeV = 2.76, 7, 8, 13 by the TOTEM Collaboration at the LHC and a combination of these data with earlier cross-section measurements at root s/GeV = 23.5, 30.7, 44.7, 52.8, 62.5 made at the intersecting storage rings. Focusing on a domain that straddles the diffractive minimum in the pp over bar and pp cross -sections, we find that these two cross-sections differ at the (2.2 - 2.6)sigma level; hence, supply evidence with this level of significance for the existence of the odderon. If combined with evidence obtained through different experiment-theory comparisons, whose significance is reported to lie in the range (3.4 - 4.6)sigma, one arrives at a (4.0 - 5.2)sigma signal for the odderon.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons .org /licenses /by /4 .0/). Funded by SCOAP3.

Automated summary

Theory suggests that the t-channel exchange of odderon may generate differences between pp and pp over bar cross-sections. Through robust comparisons using a mathematical approach, we find significant differences between pp and pp over bar elastic differential cross-sections. Combining these results with other experiment-theory comparisons, we obtain a significant signal for the existence of odderon at the (4.0 - 5.2)sigma level.