Baryon scattering at high energies: wave function, impact factor, and gluon radiation

Abstract

The scattering of a baryon consisting of three massive quarks is investigated in the high energy limit of perturbative QCD. A model of a relativistic proton-like wave function, dependent on valence quark longitudinal and transverse momenta and on quark helicities, is proposed, and we derive the baryon impact factors for two, three and four t-channel gluons. We find that the baryonic impact factor can be written as a sum of three pieces: in the first one a subsystem consisting of two of the three quarks behaves very much like the quark–antiquark pair in γ^* scattering, whereas the third quark acts as a spectator. The second term belongs to the odderon, whereas in the third (C-even) piece all three quarks participate in the scattering. This term is new and has no analogue in γ^* scattering. We also study the small x evolution of gluon radiation for each of these three terms. The first term follows the same pattern of gluon radiation as the γ^*-initiated quark–antiquark dipole, and, in particular, it contains the BFKL evolution followed by the 2→4 transition vertex (triple pomeron vertex). The odderon term is described by the standard BKP evolution, and the baryon couples to both known odderon solutions, the Janik–Wosiek solution and the BLV solution. Finally, the t-channel evolution of the third term starts with a three-reggeized gluon state, which then, via a new 3→4 transition vertex, couples to the four-gluon (two-pomeron) state. We briefly discuss a few consequences of these findings, in particular the pattern of unitarization of high energy baryon scattering amplitudes.