QCD Glueball Regge Trajectories and the Pomeron

Abstract

We report a glueball Regge trajectory emerging from diagonalizing a confining Coulomb gauge Hamiltonian for constituent gluons. Using a BCS vacuum ansatz and gap equation, the dressed gluons acquire a mass, of order 800 $MeV$, providing the quasiparticle degrees of freedom for a TDA glueball formulation. The TDA eigenstates for two constituent gluons have orbital, $L$, excitations with a characteristic energy of 400 $MeV$ revealing a clear Regge trajectory for $\vec{J} = \vec{L} + \vec{S}$, where $S$ is the total (sum) gluon spin. Significantly, the $S = 2$ glueball spectrum coincides with the Pomeron given by $\alpha_P(t)=1.08+0.25 t $. Finally, we also ascertain that lattice data supports our result, yielding an average intercept of 1.1 in good agreement with the Pomeron.