Holographic double diffractive scattering

Abstract

The holographic description of Pomeron exchange in a strongly-coupled gauge theory with an AdS dual is extended to the case of two to three scattering. We study the production event of a central particle via hadron-hadron scattering in the double Regge kinematic regime of large center-of-momentum energy and fixed momentum transfer. The computation reduces to the overlap of a holographic wave function for the central particle with a source function for the Pomerons. The formalism is applied to scalar glueball production and the resulting amplitude is studied in various kinematic limits.

Inclusive production through AdS/CFT

“…This argument has been extended to near-forward QCD scattering in AdS/CFT. We follow a similar approach as first described in [15,52]. In [15] it was shown that Pomeron exchange, i.e.…”

“…In [15,17] it was shown that this leads to the introduction of a "reggeized" AdS graviton known as the BPST pomeron; this pomeron serves as the leading contribution to the scattering in a unitarized treatment via an eikonal sum. This framework can also be extended to multi-particle near-forward scattering [52,77,78], which paves the way for the treatment of central inclusive production in section 4.…”

“…Here, collisions with large transverse momentum will be localized in a transverse space and in the Polchinski-Strassler regime; we can consider flat-space string vertices with physical momenta red shifted by the geometry. This is more fully explored in [15,52] and analogous situations for specific collider physics are described in [24,25,27,28,30,77,78,90,91].…”

“…A holographic analysis of the 2-to-3 amplitude in the double Regge limit was performed in [52] by generalizing the AdS treatment of 2-to-2 scattering. Schematically, this 2-to-3 bulk amplitude can be represented by…”

“…In general these can be complicated expressions. However, following the analysis [24,25,52,77,78], many of the general features are shared with the much simpler flat space string theory vertex operators which we review in appendix D. We now move on to the six-point function, which was discussed for flat-space string scattering in [56][57][58]. Following the above discussion and the logic in [52,77,78], we will be interested in the limit where the three-to-three amplitude takes on a factorized form, given by…”