On the loop-loop scattering amplitudes in Abelian and non-Abelian gauge theories

The high-energy scattering amplitude of two colour-singlet quark-antiquark pairs is governed by the correlation function of two Wilson loops, which follow the classical straight lines for quark (antiquark) trajectories. This quantity is expected to be free of IR divergences, differently from what happens for the parton-parton scattering amplitude, described, in the high-energy limit, by the expectation value of two Wilson lines. We shall explicitly test this IR finitness by a direct non-perturbative computation of the loop-loop scattering amplitudes in the (pedagogic, but surely physically interesting) case of quenched QED. The results obtained for the Abelian case will be generalized to the case of a non-Abelian gauge theory with N_c colours, but stopping to the fourth order in perturbation theory. In connection with the above-mentioned IR finitness, we shall also discuss some analytic properties of the loop-loop scattering amplitudes in both Abelian and non-Abelian gauge theories, when going from Minkowskian to Euclidean theory, which can be relevant to the still unsolved problem of the s-dependence of hadron-hadron total cross-sections.