The vacuum structure in QCD and hadron-hadron scattering

Abstract

Standard ideas on the structure of the vacuum in QCD suggest it to be full of fluctuating color fields. We investigate the possible influence of the chromomagnetic vacuum fields on high energy hadron-hadron reactions. We suggest that high energy quarks traversing these fields will produce soft gluon and photon radiation analogous to synchrotron radiation from electrons and positrons in a storage ring. We argue that this radiation will lead to polarization phenomena for quarks in spin- and colorspace which in turn can explain theK-factor in the Drell-Yan reaction. We point out that jet production offers another way to study these polarization phenomena. We present then a calculation of the number of “synchrotron” photons which should be emitted inp−p collisions at high energies. Thus, we predict a sizable signal of prompt photons of nnergy less than a few hundred MeV with a characteristic frequency distribution. Observation of such photons would give strong support to our naive picture. Finally we point out a number of other phenomena like charmed particle decays where our “synchrotron” effect may be of importance.