Symmetry of Anomalous Dimension Matrices for Colour Evolution of Hard Scattering Processes

Abstract

In a recent paper, Dokshitzer and Marchesini rederived the anomalous dimension matrix for colour evolution of $gg \to gg$ scattering, first derived by Kidonakis, Oderda and Sterman. They noted a weird symmetry that it possesses under interchange of internal (colour group) and external (scattering angle) degrees of freedom and speculated that this may be related to an embedding into a context that correlates internal and external variables such as string theory. In this short note, I point out another symmetry possessed by all the colour evolution anomalous dimension matrices calculated to date. It is more prosaic, but equally unexpected, and may also point to the fact that colour evolution might be understood in some deeper theoretical framework. To my knowledge it has not been pointed out elsewhere, or anticipated by any of the authors calculating these matrices. It is simply that, in a suitably chosen colour basis, they are complex symmetric matrices.