Color Correlations in the Proton

Abstract

A general QCD light front formalism to compute many-body color charge correlation functions due to quarks in the proton was constructed~\cite{Dumitru:2018vpr}. These enable new studies of color charge distributions in the nucleon. The analogies between such correlation functions to electric and magnetization charge densities in the proton and also to nucleon-nucleon correlations in the nucleus are discussed. Including the color charge correlations leads naturally to the removal of infrared divergences that occurs in two- and three-gluon exchange interactions in $q\bar{q}$-proton scattering. Extensions to include gluonic color charge correlations are discussed.

Comments: 4 pages, 1 figure, to appear as part of proceedings of the ,INT program "Probing Nucleons and Nuclei in High Energy Collisions (INT ,18-3)". To be published by World Scientific