Can Froissart Bound Explain Hadron Cross-Sections at High Energies?

Abstract

Experimentally observed slow growth of hadron cross-sections at high energies is a very intriguing but poorly understood property of QCD. It is tempting to explain the slow growth by saturation of Froissart bound or another similar universal mechanism. We reconsider derivation of Froissart bound in QCD in chiral limit and argue it can not justify experimentally observed behavior. Although the conventional Froissart-Martin bound should impose non-trivial constraint on the growth of hadron cross-sections, because of the small value of pion masses it will become restrictive only at currently unaccessible center-of-mass energies exceeding $10^5-10^6$ GeV.

Comments: 13 pages, 1 figure. v2: minor corrections, references added