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 gamma* 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 gamma* 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 gamma*-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.