On near forward high energy scattering in QCD

Abstract

We consider elastic quark-quark scattering at high energy and fixed transferred momentum. Performing factorization of soft gluon exchanges into Wilson lines vacuum expectation values and studying their properties, we find that the asymptotics of the scattering amplitude is controlled by the renormalization properties of the so called cross singularities of Wilson loops. Using this fact, we evaluate the scattering amplitude and show that its asymptotics is determined by the properties of the $2\times 2$ matrix of anomalous dimensions which appears after one renormalizes the cross singularities of Wilson loops. A generalization to the case of quark-antiquark and gluon-gluon elastic scattering is discussed.