Total Photonic and Hadronic Cross-sections

Abstract

We discuss total cross-sections within the context of the QCD calculable mini-jet model, highlighting its successes and failures. In particular we show its description of $\gamma \gamma \to hadrons$ and compare it with OPAL and L3 data. We extrapolate this result to $\gamma p$ total cross-sections and propose a phenomenological ansätz for virtual photon cross-sections. We point out that the good agreement with data obtained with the Eikonal Minijet Model should not hide the many uncertainties buried in the impact parameter distribution. A model obtained from Soft Gluon Summation is briefly discussed and its application to hadronic cross-sections is shown.

Comments: 10 pages, 5 figures, LaTeX, uses aipproc.sty. To appear in the proceedings of Photon 2000, Ambelside, U.K., Aug 2000. The title, the number of pages and the number of figures in the announcement were corrected to correspond to the submitted paper