Asymptotic properties of regge trajectories and elastic pseudoscalar-meson scattering on nucleons at high energies

A phenomenological Regge-eikonal model featuring nonlinear monotonic parametrizations of vacuum Regge trajectories, where their asymptotic behavior in the perturbative sector is taken explicitly into account, is proposed for describing the elastic diffractive scattering of light pseudoscalar mesons on nucleons. In analyzing available experimental data on angular distributions, it is shown that, at collision energies in the region √s > 13 GeV, the diffraction pattern of the processes π±p → π±p and K±p → K±p at low momentum transfers can be described qualitatively by using the same phenomenological approximations to vacuum Regge trajectories as in the case of nucleon-nucleon scattering. This fact is indicative of the possibility of explicitly relating Regge phenomenology of various hadron-hadron processes to fundamental results obtained within QCD.