In the present investigation we study the leading and subleading high-energy behavior of hadron-hadron total cross sections using a best-fit analysis of hadronic scattering data. The parametrization used for the hadron-hadron total cross sections at high energy is inspired by recent results obtained by Giordano and Meggiolaro [J. High Energy Phys. 03 (2014) 002] using a nonperturbative approach in the framework of QCD, and it reads ${\sigma }_{\mathrm{tot}}\sim B{\ln }^{2}s+C\ln s\ln \ln s$. We critically investigate if $B$ and $C$ can be obtained by means of best-fits to data for proton-proton and antiproton-proton scattering, including recent data obtained at the LHC, and also to data for other meson-baryon and baryon-baryon scattering processes. In particular, following the above-mentioned nonperturbative QCD approach, we also consider fits where the parameters $B$ and $C$ are set to $B=\kappa B_{\mathrm{th}}$ and $C=\kappa C_{\mathrm{th}}$, where $B_{\mathrm{th}}$ and $C_{\mathrm{th}}$ are universal quantities related to the QCD stable spectrum, while $\kappa$ (treated as an extra free parameter) is related to the asymptotic value of the ratio ${\sigma }_{\mathrm{el}}/{\sigma }_{\mathrm{tot}}$. Different possible scenarios are then considered and compared.

• Received 6 March 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.96.034015