Off-mass-shell Sudakov-like suppression factor for the fermionic four-point function in QCD

Abstract

We consider a four-point process, associated with a wide-angle elastic scattering of two off-mass-shell spin-1/2 matter particles, in a non-abelian gauge theory. On the basis of a worldline approach, which reverts the functional to a path-integral description of the system, we factorize an eikonal (``soft'') subsector of the full theory and calculate the Sudakov-like suppression factor for the four-point function as a whole, once we have extracted the associated anomalous dimensions and taken into account the renormalization-group controlled evolution.

Comments: 13 pages in RevTeX; 2 figures as PS files; modified text; added references. To appear in Phys. Lett. B