The soft pomeron and non-perturbative corrections in quark-quark scattering

We consider elastic quark-quark scattering at high energy with fixed momentum transfer t and perform factorization of soft-gluon exchanges into a vacuum expectation value of Wilson lines, Taking into account non-perturbative corrections whose structure is predicted from an infrared renormalon analysis, we represent the scattering amplitude as an asymptotic series. In the region of small momentum transfer, where the non-perturbative corrections are dominant, the scattering amplitude is a Gaussian distribution in t with a slope depending on a non-perturbative scale. A non-perturbative origin of the soft pomeron is thus identified. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.