The total cross section at the LHC

The hard pomeron first came to light in deep inelastic lepton scattering, but evidence that it contributes also to soft hadronic collisions is reinforced by the fact that it seems to obey a factorisation similar to that of other Regge exchanges. Including a hard-pomeron term in a fit to data for sigma(pp) and sigma(p\bar p) leads to a large total cross section at the LHC. An exact prediction is not possible because of the uncertaintities arising from screening corrections; the best estimate is 125 \pm 25 mb.