Abstract :
The high-energy elastic scattering amplitude of two colour-singlet image pairs is governed by the correlation function of two Wilson loops, which follow the classical straight lines for quark (antiquark) trajectories. This quantity is expected to be free of IR divergences, differently from what happens for the parton–parton elastic scattering amplitude, described, in the high-energy limit, by the expectation value of two Wilson lines. We shall explicitly test this IR finiteness by a direct non-perturbative computation of the loop–loop scattering amplitudes in the (pedagogic, but surely physically interesting) case of quenched QED. The results obtained for the Abelian case will be generalized to the case of a non-Abelian gauge theory with image colours, but stopping to the order image in perturbation theory. In connection with the above-mentioned IR finiteness, we shall also discuss some analytic properties of the loop–loop scattering amplitudes in both Abelian and non-Abelian gauge theories, when going from Minkowskian to Euclidean theory, which can be relevant to the still unsolved problem of the s-dependence of hadron–hadron total cross-sections.
