Meson-proton scattering at high energies

We use a model in which the energy dependence of hadronic scattering is driven at high energies primarily by semihard scattering of constituent gluons and quarks to calculate the elastic differential and total cross sections for πp and Kp scattering. Our model predicts that, as a direct consequence of the dominance of gluon and sea-quark interactions at small x, the total cross sections for all the meson-proton processes should approach equality in the TeV energy regime. The cross sections are strikingly large for energies in the upper range of cosmic-ray energies, and the expected evolution of hadronic air showers may be changed as a result