Electroweak high-energy scattering and the chiral anomaly

Abstract

The effect of perturbative QCD interactions on the high-energy scattering of electroweak vector bosons, when the exchanged channel has pion quantum numbers, is considered. The chiral anomaly is shown to appear in the couplings of particular transverse momentum diagrams, producing an enhancement of the scattering amplitude by a power of the energy. At $O({\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{s})$ a single large transverse momentum gluon is involved and, within the transverse momentum diagram framework, there is no cancellation. In higher orders, soft gluons, carrying both normal and anomalous color parity, are also present. The manipulation of a transverse momentum cutoff to replace the ultraviolet anomaly divergence by infrared divergences that can lead to confinement and chiral symmetry breaking is briefly discussed. The possible implications for electroweak symmetry breaking are noted.