Odderon in Gauge/String Duality

TL;DR

This paper explores the Odderon, a vacuum quantum number exchange in high-energy hadronic scattering, using gauge/string duality, identifying it as a Reggeized Kalb-Ramond field in string theory and analyzing its effects in both conformal and confining models.

Contribution

It identifies the Odderon as a Reggeized Kalb-Ramond field in string theory and evaluates its high-energy contribution in both ${ m f N}=4$ SYM and confining QCD-like models.

Findings

Odderon corresponds to Reggeized Kalb-Ramond field in string theory.

High-energy Odderon contribution computed for ${ m f N}=4$ SYM.

Confinement effects on Odderon estimated in hardwall model.

Abstract

At high energies, elastic hadronic cross sections, such as $pp, \overline p p, \pi^{\pm} p$, are dominated by vacuum exchange, which in leading order of the $1/N_c$ expansion has been identified as the BFKL Pomeron or its strong AdS dual the closed string Reggeized graviton \cite{Brower:2006ea}. However the difference of particle anti-particle cross sections are given by a so-called Odderon, carrying C = -1 vacuum quantum numbers identified in weak coupling with odd numbers of exchanged gluons. Here we show that in the dual description the Odderon is the Reggeized Kalb-Ramond field ($B_{\mu\nu}$) in the Neveu-Schwartz sector of closed string theory. To first order in strong coupling, the high energy contribution of Odderon is evaluated for ${\cal N} = 4$ Super Yang-Mills by a generalization of the gravity dual analysis for Pomeron in Ref. \cite{Brower:2006ea}. The consequence of confinement on the Odderon are estimated in the confining QCD-like $AdS^5$ hardwall model of Polchinski and Strassler \cite{Polchinski:2001tt}.