HIGH-QUALITY DESCRIPTION OF ELASTIC HIGH-ENERGY DATA AND PREDICTION ON NEW PHENOMENA

It is argued that only combining several of the currently used philoso phies one can get a high quality description of all the existing high energy elastic pp and ppBAR data. From this we find: (i) the Odderon c ontribution is absolutely necessary to reproduce quantitatively well t he data; (ii) there is no way that the data be quantitatively well acc ounted for if the physical quantities (in particular the total cross s ections) grow simply as In s and, most intriguing, (iii) we find hints that with increasing energies a secondary structure (appearing as a d ip or as a shoulder) develops at large \t\-values. We take the latter result with the greatest reservation (given that it is the outcome of a fit, albeit extremely good), but we are rather confident in its vali dity since we find it in the extrapolations of basically all the numer ous fits we have performed. This structure could have, marginally, bee n seen at the tevatron for \t\ values between 2 to 3 GeV2 and could pr obably be seen as a break around \t\ = 3 GeV2 in the pp slope at RHIC (around 500 GeV). The ideal places, however, to search for its confirm ation would, of course, be LHC or even better SSC where a well structu red shoulder is expected.