Soft edge of hadron scattering and mini-jet models for the total and inelastic pp cross-sections at LHC and beyond

We show that the onset and rise of QCD mini-jets provide the dynamical mechanism behind the appearance of a soft edge in pp collisions around ISR energies and thus such a soft edge is built in our mini-jet model with soft gluon resummation. Here the model is optimized for LHC at $\sqrt{s} = 7, 8 TeV$ and predictions made for higher LHC and cosmic ray energies. Further, we provide a phenomenological picture to discuss the breakup of the total cross-section into its elastic, uncorrelated and correlated inelastic pieces in the framework of a one-channel eikonal function.
Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures. This version includes typos corrected, references updated, a small change in the title, already present in version v2. In the present version two computer errors in Table I and one in Table II have been corrected, a typo in Eq.(12) has been corrected, all indicated in footnotes. Figures and conclusions are unchanged