Minijets, inelasticity and proton-proton total cross section

Inelasticity, the fraction of energy released to the secondary particles produced in a hadronic collision, is an important quantity whose behaviour was not been properly established yet. In this paper, we show a reanalysis of the Akeno's data on absorption cross section wherein inelasticity is considered to be alternatively an increasing or decreasing function of energy. Our main concern was to extract, from these data, information about the proton-proton total cross section. In our procedure, we have used average inelasticities calculated by the interacting Gluon Model, which has been corrected in order to include the air effect