An analysis on extrema and constrained bounds for the soft pomeron intercept

We investigate some aspects and consequences of the extrema bounds for the soft pomeron intercept, recently determined by means of global fits to pp and (p) over barp total cross section data at both accelerator and cosmic-ray energy regions (scattering data). We also examine the effects of the secondary reggeons by introducing fitted trajectories from Chew-Frautschi plots (spectroscopy data) and determining new constrained bounds for the pomeron intercept. In both cases we extend the analysis to baryon-p, meson-p, baryon-n, meson-n, gamma-p and gamma-gamma scattering, presenting tests on factorization and quark counting rules. We show that in all the cases investigated, the bounds lead to good descriptions of the bulk of experimental data on the total cross sections, but with different extrapolations to higher energies. Our main conclusion is that the experimental information presently available on the above quantities is not sensitive to an uncertainty of 2% in the value of the soft pomeron intercept. At 14 TeV (CERN LHC) the extrema and constrained bounds allow to infer sigma(tot) = 114 +/- 25 mb and 105 +/- 10 mb, respectively. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.