Measurements of the total, elastic and inelastic pp cross section with ATLAS

The total pp cross section is a fundamental property of the strong interaction which can not be calculated in perturbative QCD but only described based on phenomenological models. The ATLAS collaboration has recently measured the total inelastic protonproton cross section and the diffractive part of the inelastic cross section at 13 TeV in special data sets taken with low beam currents and using forward scintillators. A more precise measurement of the total pp cross section as well as elastic and inelastic contributions has been extracted from a measurement of the differential elastic cross section using the optical theorem. The ATLAS Collaboration has performed this measurement in elastic data collected with high beta* optics at 8 TeV centreofmass energy with the ALFA Roman Pot detector. From the extrapolation of the differential elastic cross section to t=0, using the optical theorem, the total cross section is extracted in a luminositydependent method with unprecedented precision. In addition the nuclear slope of the elastic tspectrum and the total elastic and inelastic cross sections are determined. ATLAS