Liouville field theory for gluon saturation in QCD at high energy Original Research Article

We argue that quantum Liouville field theory supplemented with a suitable source term is the effective theory which describes the short-range correlations of the gluon saturation momentum in the two-dimensional impact-parameter space, at sufficiently high energy and for a large number of colors. This is motivated by recent developments concerning the stochastic aspects of the high-energy evolution in QCD, together with the manifest scale invariance of the respective evolution equations and general considerations on the uncertainty principle. The source term explicitly breaks down the conformal symmetry of the (pure) Liouville action, thus introducing a physical mass scale in the problem which is identified with the average saturation momentum. We construct this source term for the case of a homogeneous distribution and show that this leads to an interesting theory: the relevant correlation functions are ultraviolet finite (and not just renormalizable) when computed in perturbation theory, due to mutual cancellations of the tadpole divergences. Possible generalizations to inhomogeneous source terms are briefly discussed.