NLO evolution of 3-quark Wilson loop operator

Abstract

It is well known that high-energy scattering of a meson from some hadronic target can be described by the interaction of that target with a color dipole formed by two Wilson lines corresponding to fast quark-antiquark pair. Moreover, the energy dependence of the scattering amplitude is governed by the evolution equation of this color dipole with respect to rapidity. Similarly, the energy dependence of scattering of a baryon can be described in terms of evolution of a three-Wilson-lines operator with respect to the rapidity of the Wilson lines. We calculate the evolution of the 3-quark Wilson loop operator in the next-to-leading order (NLO) and present a quasi-conformal evolution equation for a composite 3-Wilson-lines operator. We also obtain the linearized version of that evolution equation describing the amplitude of the odderon exchange at high energies