High energy collisions and nonperturbative QCD

Abstract

We discuss various ideas on the nonperturbative vacuum structure in QCD. The stochastic vacuum model of Dosch and Simonov is presented in some detail. We show how this model produces confinement. The model incorporates the idea of the QCD vacuum acting like a dual superconductor due to an effective chromomagnetic monopole condensate. We turn then to high energy, small momentum transfer hadron-hadron scattering. A field-theoretic formalism to treat these reactions is developed, where the basic quantities governing the scattering amplitudes are correlation functions of light-like Wegner-Wilson lines and loops. The evaluation of these correlation functions with the help of the Minkowskian version of the stochastic vacuum model is discussed. A further surprising manifestation of the nontrivial vacuum structure in QCD may be the production of anomalous soft photons in hadron-hadron collisions. We interpret these photons as being due to `synchrotron radiation from the vacuum'. A duality argument leads us from there to the expectation of anomalous pieces proportional to $(Q^2)^{1/6}$ in the electric form factors of the nucleons for small $Q^2$. Finally we sketch the idea that in the Drell-Yan reaction, where a quark-antiquark pair annihilates with the production of a lepton pair, a `chromodynamic Sokolov-Ternov effect' may be at work. This leads to a spin correlation of the $q\bar q$ pair, observable through the angular distribution of the lepton pair.