Confinement and the Supercritical Pomeron in QCD

Abstract

Deep-inelastic diffractive scaling violations have provided fundamental insight into the QCD pomeron, suggesting a single gluon inner structure rather than that of a perturbative two-gluon bound state. This paper derives a high-energy, transverse momentum cut-off, confining solution of QCD. The pomeron, in first approximation, is a single reggeized gluon plus a ``wee parton'' component that compensates for the color and particle properties of the gluon. This solution corresponds to a supercritical phase of Reggeon Field Theory. Beginning with the multi-regge behavior of massive quark and gluon amplitudes, reggeon unitarity is used to derive a reggeon diagram description of a wide class of multi-regge amplitudes, including those describing the formation and scattering of bound-state Regge poles. When quark and gluon masses are taken to zero, a logarithmic divergence is produced by helicity-flip reggeon interactions containing the infra-red quark triangle anomaly. With the gauge symmetry partially broken, this divergence selects the bound states and amplitudes of a confining theory. Both the pomeron and hadrons have an anomalous color parity wee-parton component. For the pomeron the wee parton component determines that it carries negative color charge parity and that the leading singularity is an isolated Regge pole.