Fresh look at experimental evidence for odderon exchange

Theory suggests that in high-energy elastic hadron+hadron scattering, t-channel exchange of a family of colourless crossingodd
states – the odderon – may generate differences between pp¯ and pp cross-sections in the neighbourhood of the
diffractive minimum. Using a mathematical approach based on interpolation via continued fractions enhanced by statistical
sampling, we develop robust comparisons between pp¯ elastic differential cross-sections measured at √s=1.96 TeV by the
D0 Collaboration at the Tevatron and function-form-unbiased extrapolations to this energy of kindred pp measurements at
√s/TeV=2.76,7,8,13 by the TOTEM Collaboration at the LHC and a combination of these data with earlier cross-section
measurements at √s/GeV=23.5,30.7,44.7,52.8,62.5 made at the intersecting storage rings. Focusing on a domain that
straddles the diffractive minimum in the pp¯ and pp cross-sections, we find that these two cross-sections differ at the
(2.2−2.6)σ level; hence, supply evidence with this level of significance for the existence of the odderon. If combined with
evidence obtained through different experiment-theory comparisons, whose significance is reported to lie in the range
(3.4−4.6)σ, one arrives at a (4.0−5.2)σ signal for the odderon.