On a relation between production processes and total cross sections

Abstract

Perturbative QCD is the appropriate tool to describe many important properties of the inclusive observables measured at electron-proton (or ion) colliders, such as the energy dependence of the total cross sections in well-chosen kinematical regions. This is because the electron may effectively be replaced by its cloud of photons, whose virtualities provide a hard scale that enables perturbative expansions. At hadron colliders instead, there is no hard scale in the initial state. Therefore, the observables one may compute perturbatively involve the production of jets, and thus belong to a quite different class of observables. However, it turns out that there is a formal relation between production processes and total cross sections, enabling one to apply calculations of the latter to the former. We review this relation, and present our recent proof that it holds at next-to-leading order (in the BFKL sense).