We discuss an apparent correlation between the onset of the rising regime for the total crosssections and the slowdown of the rise of the forward slopes with energy. It is shown that even at highest energies achieved with the LHC the proper sizes of the colliding protons comprise the bulk of the the interaction region. This seems to witness that the "asymptopia" -a hypothetical "truly asymptotic" regime -lies at energies no less than O(100 TeV). In the course of reasoning we also discuss the question of the dependence of the effective sizes of hadrons in collision on the type of their interaction.
The ProblemLet us look at Fig. 1 presenting the energy evolution of the total cross sections (σ tot ) and forward slopes (B) for proton-proton interactions. The database (DB17+) of experimental results for the set of the scattering parameters G pp ≡ {G i pp } 2 i=1 = {σ tot , B} is used in the present paper 1 . The set for σ tot contains the data from [1] and preliminary TOTEM results at √ s = 2.76 [2] and 13 TeV [3], the data sample for B unites the subset from [4] with recent improvement from [5] and the new result at √ s = 8 TeV [6] as well as with preliminary points at √ s = 0.20 [7], 2.76 [8] and 13 TeV [3].