Experimental results on pp forward elastic scattering and the possibility of universal shrinkage of the hadronic diffraction cone

The differential cross section of pp scattering has been measured in the energy region 100–300 GeV and in the t-range 0.002 < | t| < 0.04 (GeV/| c) 2. The results on the real part of the scattering amplitude agrees with dispersion relation calculations. We also report on our determination of the slope parameter b together with an analysis of the world data of b for different hadrons and different t-values. It is shown that the data are consistent with the hypothesis of a universal shrinkage of the hadronic diffraction cone at high energies.