We explore the role of soft gluon exchange in heavy quarkonium production at large transverse momentum. We find uncanceled infrared poles at NNLO that are not matched by conventional NRQCD matrix elements. We show, however, that gauge invariance and factorization require that conventional NRQCD production operators be modified to include nonabelian phases or Wilson lines. With appropriately modified operators, factorization is restored at NNLO. We also argue that, in the absence of special cancellations, infrared poles at yet higher orders may require the inclusion of additional nonlocal operators, not present in the NRQCD expansion in relative veloctiy.

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We study the transition of a heavy quark pair from octet to singlet color configurations at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in heavy quarkonium production. We show that the infrared singularities in this process are consistent with NRQCD factorization to all orders in the heavy quark relative velocity v. This factorization requires the gauge-completed matrix elements that we introduced previously to prove NNLO factorization to order v 2 .

We obtain an exact result for the soft gluon production and its p T distribution due to a gluon loop in a constant chromo-electric background field E a with arbitrary color. Unlike Schwinger's result for e + e − pair production in QED which depends only on one gauge invariant quantity, the electric field E, we find that the p T distribution of the gluons depend on two gauge invariant quantities, E a E a and [d abc E a E b E c ] 2 .

In Maxwell theory the constant electric charge e of the electron is consistent with the continuity equation ∂ µ j µ (x) = 0 where j µ (x) is the current density of the electron where the repeated indices component of a corresponding current density by integrating over the entire (physically) allowed volume, the color charge q a (t) of the quark in Yang-Mills theory is time dependent. In this paper we derive the general form of eight time dependent fundamental color charges q a (t) of the quark in Yang-Mills theory in SU(3) where a = 1, 2, ..., 8.

We study the production and equilibration of the gluon-minijet plasma expected to be formed in the central region of ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions at the BNL-RHIC and the CERN-LHC by solving a self-consistent relativistic transport equation. We compute the minijet production within perturbative QCD. Subsequent collisions among the semi-hard partons are treated by considering the elastic gg → gg processes with screening of the long wavelength modes taken into account. We determine the time τ eq where close to ideal hydrodynamic flow sets in, and find rather similar numbers for central heavy-ion collisions at BNL-RHIC and CERN-LHC energies. The number densities, energy densities and temperatures of the minijet plasma are found to be different at RHIC and LHC, e.g. T (τ eq ) ∼ 220 MeV and 380 MeV, respectively.

We study the production of heavy quarkonium in association with an additional heavy pair. We argue that important contributions may come from phase space regions where three heavy fermions are separated by relative velocities much lower than the speed of light, and to which standard effective field theories do not apply. In this region, infrared sensitive color exchange is specific to the presence of the unpaired (anti)quark. This effect vanishes as the motion of the additional particle becomes relativistic with respect to the pair, and is completely absent for massless quarks and gluons in the final state.

In the kinematical region where the center of mass energy is much larger than all other scales, the Drell-Yan process can be formulated in the target rest frame in terms of the same color dipole cross section as low Bjorken-x deep inelastic scattering. Since the mechanisms for heavy dilepton production appear very different in the dipole approach and in the conventional parton model, one may wonder whether these two formulations really represent the same physics. We perform a comparison of numerical calculations in the color dipole approach with calculations in the next-to-leading order parton model. For proton-proton scattering, the results are very similar at low x 2 from fixed target to RHIC energies, confirming the close connection between these two very different approaches. We also compare the transverse momentum distributions of Drell-Yan dileptons predicted in both formulations. The range of applicability of the dipole formulation and the impact of future Drell-Yan data from RHIC for determining the color dipole cross section are discussed. A detailed derivation of the dipole formulation of the Drell-Yan process is also included.