QCD instantons and the soft pomeron

✍ Scribed by Dmitri Kharzeev; Yuri V. Kovchegov; Eugene Levin

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 218 KB
• Volume: 690
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0375-9474
• DOI: 10.1016/s0375-9474(01)00352-9

✦ Synopsis

We study the rôle of semiclassical QCD vacuum solutions in high-energy scattering by considering the instanton contribution to hadronic cross sections. We propose a new type of instanton-induced interactions ("instanton ladder") that leads to the rising with energy cross section σ ∼ s ∆ of Regge type (the pomeron). We argue that this interaction may be responsible for the structure of the soft pomeron. The intercept ∆ > 0 is calculated. It has a nonanalytic dependence on the strong coupling constant, allowing a nonsingular continuation into the nonperturbative region. We derive the pomeron trajectory, which appears to be approximately linear in some range of (negative) momentum transfer t, but exhibits a curvature at small t. Possible rôle of instantons in multiparticle production is also discussed.