English

Soft Gluon Wave Function and Evolution Operator in the CGC at Next-to-Leading Order

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-07-20 v1 High Energy Physics - Theory Nuclear Theory

Abstract

We construct the soft gluon light cone wave function of a fast moving hadron and the associated unitary evolution operator Ω\Omega up to O(g2)\mathcal{O}(g^{2}) in pure Yang Mills theory (Nf=0)(N_{f} = 0), within the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) framework. Working in light cone gauge, we perform a Born Oppenheimer separation between fast valence and soft modes and implement the eikonal approximation, which allows Ω\Omega to be written as a fully normal ordered series in soft gluon creation and annihilation operators. The expansion coefficients are functionals of the non-commuting valence color charge density operators ρ\rho. We fix the coefficients by using the unitarity and explicit diagrammatic calculations within light-cone perturbation theory (LCPT). As an application, we diagonalize the pure Yang Mills soft Hamiltonian through orders gg and g2g^{2} and show that the off diagonal mixing elements between Fock sectors cancel leading to the coherent background field energy proportional to ρ2\rho^{2}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.18373,
  title  = {Soft Gluon Wave Function and Evolution Operator in the CGC at Next-to-Leading Order},
  author = {Ramkumar Radhakrishnan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.18373},
  year   = {2026}
}

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57 pages