The Factorisation of the t-channel Pole in Quark-Gluon Scattering

Abstract

By exploring the scattering of specific helicity states in quark-gluon scattering at tree level we show explicitly that the t-channel pole can be described exactly as a contraction of two local currents. Furthermore, we demonstrate that out of eight non-zero helicity possibilities, only two suppressed channels have contributions that are not pure, factorised t-channel poles. We thereby extract a gauge-invariant definition for the t-channel current generated by the scattering of a gluon. This offers a slight improvement in the description of gluon scattering in the framework of arXiv:0908.2786 for the prediction of n-jet rates at hadron colliders.