Small-angle polarization in high-energy p-p scattering through nonperturbative chiral symmetry breaking.

Abstract

We show that a large anomalous contribution due to nonperturbative instanton-like gluonic field configurations to the axial charge of the proton implies high-energy spin effects in $p-p$ elastic scattering. This is the same mechanism which is responsible for anomalous baryon number violation at high energy in the standard model. We compute the proton polarization due to these effects and we show that it is proportional to the center-of-mass scattering angle with a universal (energy-independent) slope of order unity.