Soft interactions of hadrons in QCD

Abstract

The approach to strong interaction of hadrons, based on the 1/N-expansion in QCD and the colour-tube or string model of hadrons is reviewed. It is shown how to relate this approach to the reggeon calculus method. The space-time picture of hadronic interactions at high energies is discussed. The applications of the approach to the hadronic spectrum, total interactions cross sections, multiparticle production at high energies are considered. It is shown that the quark-gluon strings model (QGSM), based on this approach, gives a perfect description of many aspects of hadronic interactions: diffractive processes, multiplicity distributions, correlations, inclusive spectra of different particles in a broad energy region and allows one to make predictions for future hadronic colliders.