Odderon Exchange in Elastic Proton-Proton and Proton-Antiproton Scattering at TeV Energies

Abstract: The odderon, a leading crossing-odd $t$-channel exchange, was first proposed by L. Lukaszuk and B. Nicolescu in 1973, but its existence remained elusive for 48 years. Elastic proton-proton scattering measurements at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and elastic proton-antiproton scattering measurements at FNAL's Tevatron, performed at TeV-scale center-of-mass energies ($\sqrt{s}$) and over wide ranges of squared four-momentum transfer ($t$), opened new opportunities to study the physics of elastic hadronic processes which ultimately led to the discovery of odderon exchange in the nonperturbative domain of strong interactions, as detailed in this dissertation. In quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the fundamental theory of strong interactions, the odderon is described in the perturbative regime as a $t$-channel exchange of an odd number of interacting gluons.