Seeing through the confinement screen: DGLAP/BFKL mixing and light-ray matching in QCD
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1.
University of Chicago
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2.
California Institute of Technology
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3.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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4.
Peking University
Abstract
We argue that collider observables such as hadron number flux can be matched onto a linear combination of detectors/light-ray operators in perturbative QCD. The spectrum of detectors in QCD is subtle, due to recombination between the DGLAP and BFKL trajectories. We explain how to define and renormalize these trajectories at one-loop, systematically incorporating their recombination. The leading and subleading soft gluon theorems play an important role, and our analysis suggests the presence of an infinite series of further subleading soft theorems for squared-amplitudes/form factors. Combined with our light-ray matching hypothesis, the anomalous dimensions of recombined DGLAP/BFKL detectors yield a prediction for the energy dependence of the number of particles in a jet, as well as other predictions for more general energy-weighted hadron measurements. We compare these predictions to Monte-Carlo simulations, finding good agreement.
Copyright and License
© The Authors. Article funded by SCOAP3. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
Acknowledgement
We especially thank Petr Kravchuk for initial collaboration on this work and many helpful insights. We thank Arindam Bhattacharya, Ankita Budhraja, Cliff Cheung, Lance Dixon, Tom Hartman, Enrico Herrmann, Alexandre Homrich, Murat Koloğlu, Kyle Lee, Yibei Li, Yue-Zhou Li, Juan Maldacena, Ian Moult, Julio Parra-Martinez, Andrea Puhm, Chia-Hsien Shen, Iain Stewart, Jesse Thaler, Raju Venugopalan, Wouter Waalewijn, and Xiaoyuan Zhang for helpful discussions. We also thank the participants and organizers of the “Energy Operators in Particle Physics, Quantum Field Theory and Gravity” workshop at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics for stimulating discussions.
Funding
HC is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics under grant Contract Number DE-SC0011090. DSD is supported in part by Simons Foundation grant 488657 (Simons Collaboration on the Nonperturbative Bootstrap) and the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under Award Number DE-SC0011632. CHC is supported by a Kadanoff fellowship at the University of Chicago. HXZ is supported by National Science Foundation of China under contract No. 12425505.
Files
JHEP02(2026)251.pdf
Additional details
Related works
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- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2506.06431 (arXiv)
Funding
- United States Department of Energy
- DE-SC0011090
- Simons Foundation
- 488657
- United States Department of Energy
- DE-SC0011632
- University of Chicago
- National Science Foundation of China
- 12425505
- SCOAP3
Dates
- Submitted
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2025-10-02
- Accepted
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2026-01-09
- Available
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2026-02-26Version of record
Caltech Custom Metadata
- Caltech groups
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics , Physics Department , Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
- Publication Status
- Published