Diffractive dissociation re-visited for predictions at the LHC

We describe the formalism and present the results for a triple-Regge analysis of the available pp and p (p) over bar high-energy data which explicitly account for absorptive corrections. In particular, we allow for the gap survival probability, S(2), in single-proton diffractive dissociation. Since for pp scattering the value of S(2) is rather small, the triple-pomeron vertex obtained in this analysis is larger than that obtained in the old analyses where the suppression caused by the absorptive corrections was implicitly included in an effective vertex. We show that the bare triple-pomeron coupling that we extract from the pp and p (p) over bar data is consistent with that obtained in a description of the gamma p -> J/psi + Y HERA data. The analyses of the data prefer a zero slope, corresponding to the small size of the bare vertex, giving the hope of a smooth matching to the perturbative QCD treatment of the triple-pomeron coupling.