Near-integrability and confinement for high-energy hadron-hadron collisions

We investigate an effective Hamiltonian for QCD at large s, in which longitudinal gauge degrees of freedom are suppressed, but not eliminated. In an axial gauge the effective field theory is a set of coupled (1+1)-dimensional principal-chiral models, which are completely integrable. The confinement problem is solvable in this context, and we find the longitudinal and transverse string tensions with techniques already used for a similar Hamiltonian in (2+1)-dimensions. We find some a posteriori justification for the effective Hamiltonian as an eikonal approximation. Hadrons in this approximation consist of partons, which are quarks and soliton-like excitations of the sigma models. Diffractive hadron-hadron scattering appears primarily due to exchange of longitudinal flux between partons.Comment: Typographical errors corrected, language improved, reference adde

High energy scattering in 2+1 QCD

High energy scattering in 2+1 QCD is studied using the recent approach of Verlinde and Verlinde. We calculate the color singlet part of the quark-quark scattering exactly within this approach, and discuss some physical implication of this result. We also demonstrate, by two independent methods, that reggeization fails for the color singlet channel. We briefly comment on the problem in 3+1 QCD.Comment: 20 pages, references adde

The Q2Q^2 dependence of the hard diffractive photoproduction of vector meson or photon and the range of pQCD validity

We consider two coupled problems. We study the dependence on photon virtuality $Q^2$ for the semihard quasi--elastic photoproduction of neutral vector mesons on a quark, gluon or real photon (at $s\gg p_{\bot}^2,\;Q^2; \; p_{\bot}^2\gg \mu^2 \approx (0.3$ GeV)$^2$). To this end we calculate the corresponding amplitudes (in an analytical form) in the lowest nontrivial approximation of perturbative QCD. It is shown that the amplitude for the production of light meson varies very rapidly with the photon virtuality near $Q^2=0$. We estimate the bound of the pQCD validity region for such processes. For the real incident photon the obtained bound for the $\rho$ meson production is very high. This bound decreases fast with the increase of $Q^2$, and we expect that the virtual photoproduction at HERA gives opportunity to test the pQCD results. The signature of this region is discussed. For the hard Compton effect the pQCD should work good at not too high $p_{\bot}$, and this effect seems measurable at HERA.Comment: ReVTeX, 36 pages, 5 Postscript figures, uses epsf.st

Infrared safety of impact factors for colourless particle interactions

We demonstrate, to next-to-leading order accuracy, the cancellation of the infrared singularities in the impact factors which arise in the QCD description of high energy processes A + B -> A' + B' of colourless particles. We study the example where A is a virtual photon in detail, but show that the result is true in general.Comment: 31 pages latex including 10 figure