NLO evolution of 3-quark Wilson loop operator

TL;DR

This paper derives the next-to-leading order evolution equation for a 3-quark Wilson loop operator, advancing understanding of baryon scattering at high energies and providing a quasi-conformal form and odderon amplitude description.

Contribution

It presents the first NLO evolution equation for the 3-quark Wilson loop operator, extending high-energy QCD analysis from dipoles to baryons.

Findings

Derived the NLO evolution equation for the 3-quark Wilson loop.

Presented a quasi-conformal form of the evolution equation.

Linearized the equation to describe odderon exchange amplitude.

Abstract

It is well known that high-energy scattering of a meson from some hadronic target can be described by the interaction of that target with a color dipole formed by two Wilson lines corresponding to fast quark-antiquark pair. Moreover, the energy dependence of the scattering amplitude is governed by the evolution equation of this color dipole with respect to rapidity. Similarly, the energy dependence of scattering of a baryon can be described in terms of evolution of a three-Wilson-lines operator with respect to the rapidity of the Wilson lines. We calculate the evolution of the 3-quark Wilson loop operator in the next-to-leading order (NLO) and present a quasi-conformal evolution equation for a composite 3-Wilson-lines operator. We also obtain the linearized version of that evolution equation describing the amplitude of the odderon exchange at high energies.