text:
# 1 Introduction

## 1 Introduction

It has been long recognized that at asymptotically high energies hadronic cross sections are dominated by soft nonperturbative physics. In particular the validity of the Froissart bound for the total cross section requires a mass gap in the spectrum. The corresponding generation of the pion mass in QCD, or the generation of the glueball mass in pure gluodynamics, is a bona fide nonperturbative effect. However, even though the asymptotics is expected to be nonperturbative, perturbative dynamics may well play an important role in the preasymptotic regime.

Indeed, cross sections for small objects, like highly virtual photon $`\gamma ^{}`$, or heavy quarkonium (”onium”) are perturbative up to very high energies, as long as the size of the system remains small. The main perturbative mechanism that drives the growth of cross sections with energy is the BFKL evolution . It predicts that cross sections grow exponentially, $`\sigma s^\omega `$, where $`\omega =4\mathrm{ln}2N_c\frac{\alpha _s}{\pi }`$ to leading order in $`\alpha _s`$. This behaviour is nonunitary, as it violates the Froissart bound $`\sigma \frac{\pi }{m^2}t^2`$. Here $`t`$ is the rapidity, $`t=\mathrm{ln}\frac{s}{m^2}`$, and $`m`$ denotes the mass of the lightest particle in the theory. The main reason for this lack of unitarity is the growth of the partonic density in the hadronic system. As the partonic density reaches a critical value of order $`1/\alpha _s`$, the BFKL approach ceases to be valid, and one must take into account finite density effects.

This has been recognized and forcefully advocated in the pioneering works  and later in . A more complete approach to QCD evolution at finite density has been developed more recently in . These papers treat the QCD evolution to leading logarithmic approximation, but to all orders in the gluon density. The resulting system of evolution equations is a set of functional equations, and its study so far has not been feasible beyond the double logarithmic approximation.

There exists however a regime in which the general nonlinear evolution simplifies. This happens when a small object (such as highly virtual photon) scatters on a large target (such as a large nucleus). In this case the leading nonlinear corrections are due to the fact that the projectile wave function at high energy has a large multigluon component. As soon as the number of gluons in these multigluon states becomes large, one has to account for the possibility that more than one gluon scatters, even if the gluonic density may still be small. When the target is large, so that the scattering probability of a gluon is parametrically larger than $`\alpha _s`$ (for a large nucleus of atomic number $`A`$, it is $`O(A^{1/3}\alpha _s)`$), these corrections become important earlier than those due to high density effects.

The system of evolution equations which takes into account these multiple scattering effects has been derived first in . In  its large $`N_c`$ limit was derived independently in the dipole picture of . The advantage of the large $`N_c`$ limit is that the (otherwise infinite) hierarchy of evolution equations closes and becomes a single equation for the gluon density (or dipole scattering probability). We will refer to this nonlinear equation as the BK equation. The relation between the equations of  and  has been discussed in , where it was shown that the latter is the limit of the former when the induced field density is small. This result was later rederived by similar methods in 111 We note that although it is claimed verbally in  that the equations of  should be equivalent to those of  not only for small induced fields, but also in general, the actual mathematical analysis of  does not justify this claim. The mathematical analysis of  (up to notational differences) is equivalent to that of , where the origin of the differences between the results of  and  has been discussed..

The range of validity of the BK equation is wider than that of the BFKL evolution in the sense that it can be applied to scattering on large targets. If the target is large so that the scattering probability of a given probe on it is of order unity, the BFKL evolution violates unitarity very quickly, at rapidities of order $`t_{BFKL}1/\alpha _sN_c`$. This violation of unitarity stems from the scattering probability rising above one locally in impact parameter space. In contrast to BFKL, the BK evolution ensures that the scattering probability at a given impact parameter is always below unity. Nevertheless, as we will discuss in the following, for scattering of a (small) projectile of transverse size $`x_0`$ on a (large) target of size $`R_0`$, the BK evolution violates unitarity for rapidities $`t>t_{BK}1/\alpha _sN_c\mathrm{ln}(R_0/x_0)`$. The reason for this violation is that the value of the maximal impact parameter that contributes to scattering grows exponentially with rapidity. Thus even though the scattering probabilities remain unitary, the total cross section grows exponentially, $`\sigma \mathrm{exp}\{ϵt\}`$, and violates the Froissart bound. This is the main result of . We can give a crude estimate of the exponent $`ϵ`$, but we are not able to perform a reliable analytical calculation at this point. However the numerical results of  give $`ϵ=0.75\omega `$, which is indeed compatible with our rough estimate. Thus the BK exponent is smaller than the BFKL one, but not very significantly.

The reason why at high enough energy the BK evolution ceases to be valid is that the projectile wave function becomes dense, and further evolution is affected by the high density effects in the projectile wave function. The onset of these corrections is at $`t\frac{1}{\alpha _sN_c}\mathrm{ln}\frac{1}{\alpha _s}`$. As discussed below, the gluon density in the center of the projectile is large at energies at which large values of the impact parameter become dominant. Thus, finite density corrections in the central region are important. Their main direct effect is to slow down the growth of density in the central region, but this must also have a large effect on the growth of the scattering probability at large impact parameters. As we will discuss below, this growth at large impact parameter is due to the long range Coulomb (or Weizsäcker-Williams) fields originating from the fluctuation of the colour charge in the central ”black” region. The finite density effects inevitably reduce the magnitude of these fluctuations and therefore also the Coulomb fields which feed the periphery. We expect therefore that these corrections are likely to reduce the exponential $`ϵ`$ significantly. The proper calculation of the exponential $`ϵ`$ must involve the analysis of the full nonlinear equation, including the wave function saturation effects .

One aim of the present paper is to furnish more details to the derivations of . This is done in sections 3 and 4, after the short recourse to the BFKL evolution in section 2. The other aim is to reflect on possible implications of these two distinct perturbative mechanisms for the power like growth of the total cross section. The first mechanism - the growth of partonic density - is naturally associated with small systems. As long as the size of the system is small and also the number of partons not very large, one expects that the growth of density is indeed the leading mechanism. This suggests that the BFKL exponent (possibly modified by higher order corrections) dominates the scattering cross section of small systems. However, if a typical hadron is a dense partonic system rather than a dilute one, then the density growth mechanism is rendered irrelevant by saturation effects. It is only the power like growth due to the perturbative expansion in the transverse plane which remains effective in this case. One is thus lead naturally to conjecture, that it is this latter mechanism that is responsible for the experimentally found ”soft pomeron” behaviour of hadronic cross sections.

Associating the soft pomeron with a perturbative phenomenon is certainly unconventional. All models of the soft pomeron that we are aware of, try to explain the power growth of cross sections by a nonperturbative mechanism . On the other hand, this power growth of the cross section implies by the extension of Heisenberg’s argument  the power like distribution of ”matter” in impact parameter space. Perturbation theory naturally provides such a mechanism, since it operates with massless gluons and thus long range Coulomb fields. Thus it could well be that the role of nonperturbative physics is limited to taming the powerlike perturbative growth in asymptotia, rather than to provide an additional mechanism for a power like growth in the pre-asymptotic regime!222 We note that the models of , when translated into our language try to provide an alternative nonperturbative mechanism for the growth of the density rather than for the growth in impact parameter space. Since the exponent governing this growth is supposed to be much smaller than the perturbative one, it is hard to see how this sort of mechanism can survive as the leading one when juxtaposed with BFKL.

For this scenario to be viable, the basic saturated (”black”) building blocks of hadrons must be themselves small in size, so that the perturbative Coulomb like structure of the gluon fields is still relevant at these distances. It has been pointed out repeatedly in the literature that the distance scale associated with the constituent quarks is much smaller than the scale of confining physics. Indeed, the models  deal with scales of order .3 fermi. The picture we suggest therefore, is that of a proton containing three small ”black” constituent quarks with the size about .3 fermi in the proton rest frame. As the proton is boosted, the radius of constituent quarks grows with half the soft pomeron power, $`rs^{.04}`$. The mechanism of this growth is perturbative and the power itself should be calculable from the full nonlinear QCD evolution equation . Section 5 of the present paper is devoted to a more detailed discussion of this scenario.

## 2 The two exponents of the BFKL equation

To illustrate the perturbative features of high energy reactions, we choose the example of Deeply Inelastic Scattering. The subprocess relevant to strong interaction physics is the scattering of the photon of virtuality $`Q^2`$ on a proton. In the parton model, the photon counts the number of charged partons in the proton. The scattering cross section is then

$$\sigma _{DIS}(Q,x)=\frac{\alpha _{em}}{Q^2}\underset{i}{}e_i^2N_i(Q,x),$$
(1)
where the first factor is the parton level cross section while $`N_i`$ is the number of partons of a given species in the proton. The number of partons depends on both, the resolution scale $`Q^2`$ and the energy at which the proton wave function is probed, $`x=\frac{Q^2}{Q^2+W^2}`$. Here $`W`$ denotes the center of mass energy of the $`\gamma ^{}p`$ system. One can define the phase space density of partons, $`\varphi (k)`$, in terms of which

$$N(Q^2,x)=_Sd^2b_{k^2Q^2}d^2k\varphi (b,k,x),$$
(2)
where $`k`$ is the intrinsic transverse momentum of the parton, and $`b`$ is the impact parameter at which the parton is found in the transverse plane.

Although the photon directly counts the number of charged partons, i.e. quarks, at low $`x`$ the proton wave function is dominated by gluons. The number of quarks is then directly determined by the gluon content of the wave function. In the following we will therefore concentrate on the gluons only.

At low $`x`$, in the leading logarithmic approximation, the gluon density $`\varphi `$ is determined by the asymptotic solution of the BFKL equation. According to this solution, the distribution of gluons is

$$\varphi (b,k,x,k_0)\mathrm{exp}\{\omega t\frac{\mathrm{ln}^2b^2kk_0}{a^2t}\}.$$
(3)
Here $`t=\mathrm{ln}1/x`$ is the rapidity, $`\omega =4\mathrm{ln}2N_c\alpha _s/\pi `$ and $`a^2=14\zeta (3)N_c\alpha _s/\pi `$ with $`\zeta (n)`$ being the Riemann zeta-function, $`\zeta (3)=1.202\mathrm{}`$. This distribution depends also on $`k_0`$ which characterizes the initial transverse momentum of the gluon which gave rise to $`\varphi `$ through the evolution to high $`t`$. Formula (3) is valid for impact parameters which are not too large, namely

$$0\mathrm{ln}b^2kk_0\alpha _st.$$
(4)
The striking feature of eq.(3) is that even if at low rapidity $`t_0`$ one starts with a single gluon, after evolution to high enough $`t`$, the density of gluons at small impact parameters becomes exponentially large. Within the diffusion radius $`\mathrm{ln}bat^{1/2}`$, the overall scale of density is determined by the exponential factor $`\mathrm{exp}\{\omega t\}`$. Thus using eq.(3) in the gluonic analog of eq.(1) gives the total cross section which grows exponentially with rapidity.

The high density at central impact parameters is not the only source of growth in eq.(3). The gluon density does decrease towards the peripheral impact parameters, but it does so rather slowly. For a given transverse momentum $`k`$, the density stays finite up to impact parameters of order $`\mathrm{ln}(b^2kk_0)\alpha _st`$. One can not establish the exact proportionality coefficient from eq.(3), since the validity of this equation does not extend to such large impact parameters. However impact parameters of order $`\mathrm{ln}(b^2kk_0)=\nu \alpha _st`$ with very small $`\nu `$ are still covered by eq.(3). For such impact parameters the density is still exponentially large, although parametrically smaller than inside the ”diffusion radius”. These peripheral impact parameters do not contribute to the leading BFKL exponential. When the density is integrated over the impact parameter plane to calculate the total number of gluons, one obtains the leading BFKL result $`N(t)=d^2b\varphi (b,t)=a\mathrm{exp}\omega t`$ which is dominated by the impact parameters within the diffusion radius. However the contribution of the peripheral region is by itself also exponentially increasing. Were we to exclude the central impact parameters from the integration region, we would still get an exponentially large contribution of the form $`\mathrm{exp}\{ϵ\alpha _st\}`$. The exponent here is smaller than the leading BFKL one, and thus gives a negligible contribution to the total cross section within the BFKL framework. However, this exponent is nevertheless present, and its physical origin is quite distinct from the exponential growth of partonic density.

The exponential growth of the cross section violates the Froissart bound which requires the total cross section to grow not faster than the second power of the logarithm of energy

$$\sigma _{total}\frac{\pi }{m_\pi ^2}\mathrm{ln}^2\frac{s}{m_\pi ^2}.$$
(5)
The leading exponential growth of the BFKL cross section is of course unphysical at high enough energies. Taken at its face value eq.(1) in conjunction with eq.(3) would mean that the probability for scattering of a strongly interacting probe at fixed impact parameter grows without bound at large energy. This is inconsistent with the fact that the probability can not exceed one, and violates unitarity of the scattering probability at fixed impact parameter. The reason is that a strongly interacting probe has finite probability to interact with more than one gluon at fixed $`b`$ when the gluon density at fixed impact parameter and fixed resolution $`Q^2`$ exceeds $`1/\alpha _s`$. Thus the cross section is not proportional to the number of gluons anymore. Multiple scattering effects must be properly taken into account in order to relate the gluon density with the scattering probability.

A nonlinear QCD evolution equation that takes into account these multiple scattering effects has been derived by Balitsky . Its large $`N_c`$ version was obtained by Kovchegov  using Mueller’s dipole model approach. In the next two sections we will discuss how far this perturbative resummation goes beyond the simple BFKL framework towards restoring the unitarity of the hadronic cross sections.

We start our discussion with considering the evolution in the target rest frame.

## 3 The BK evolution in the target rest frame

The essence of the BK evolution is the following. Suppose at some initial rapidity $`t_0`$ we are interested in the scattering of a probe consisting of a $`\overline{q}q`$ dipole on a large hadronic target, for example a heavy nucleus. The scattering probability of a dipole with legs at transverse coordinates $`x`$ and $`y`$ on a hadronic target is $`N(x,y)`$. Increasing the center of mass energy (or rapidity) amounts to boosting the dipole to rapidity $`t=t_0+\delta t`$. Under boost, the longitudinal Coulomb field associated with the dipole acquires a transverse part, i.e., the dipole of transverse size $`xy`$ generates an extra gluonic component whose density is given by the equivalent gluon content of the Weizsäcker-Williams field of the dipole, see Fig. 1:

$$|q(x)\overline{q}(y)A|q(x)\overline{q}(y)g(z)$$
(6)
with

$$A^2=\frac{\alpha _sN_c}{2\pi ^2}\delta t\frac{(xy)^2}{(xz)^2(xy)^2}.$$
(7)
In the large $`N_c`$ limit, the gluon is equivalent to a quark-antiquark pair. This and the global colour conservation of the QCD evolution implies that the singlet $`\overline{q}qg`$ state is equivalent to two dipoles with coordinates $`x,z`$ and $`y,z`$ respectively, see Fig. 1. In the leading large $`N_c`$ approximation, the dipoles scatter independently of each other. Thus the probability for the scattering of the pair of dipoles is

$$N(x,z;y,z)=N(x,z)+N(y,z)N(x,z)N(y,z).$$
(8)
The last negative term, $`N(x,z)N(y,z)`$, is the probability that both dipoles scatter in the same collision. Such double scattering events should be counted once and not twice in the total cross section, and the last term in eq. (8) corrects the overcounting of $`N(x,z)+N(y,z)`$.

This leads to the following nonlinear evolution equation for the dipole scattering probability:

$`{\displaystyle \frac{d}{dt}}N(x,y)={\displaystyle \frac{\alpha _sN_c}{2\pi ^2}}{\displaystyle d^2z\frac{(xy)^2}{(xz)^2(yz)^2}}`$ (9)
$`[N(x,z)+N(y,z)N(x,z)N(z,y)N(x,y)].`$
The first three terms in eq. (9) are just the ones discussed above, while the last term is the ”virtual” correction which ensures that the dipole wave function stays normalized throughout the evolution.

The following two properties of the BK equation eq.(9) are important for our discussion. First, as stressed above, it takes into account multiple scattering corrections. Second, within this approach the projectile wave function evolves according to the linear evolution of the dipole model. Interactions between the dipoles in the projectile wavefunction are not taken into account. This is seen explicitly e.g. from the original derivation of  where the density of dipoles in the projectile wave function $`n_1(x,y)`$ satisfies the linear BFKL evolution equation,

$`{\displaystyle \frac{d}{dt}}n_1(x,y)={\displaystyle \frac{\alpha _sN_c}{2\pi ^2}}{\displaystyle d^2z}`$ (10)
$`[{\displaystyle \frac{1}{(yz)^2}}n_1(x,z)+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{(xz)^2}}n_1(y,z){\displaystyle \frac{(xy)^2}{(xz)^2(yz)^2}}n_1(x,y)].`$
The nonlinearity in the BK evolution equation comes not from the nonlinearities in the evolution of the projectile wave function, but from the nonlinearity in the relation between the dipole density and the scattering probability. This is again given explicitly in . A single dipole $`(x_0,y_0)`$ at initial rapidity $`t_0`$ develops at a greater rapidity $`t`$ into a wave function characterized by the $`m`$-dipole densities, $`n_m(x_0,y_0,t_0|x_1,y_1;\mathrm{};x_m,y_m,t)`$. If the single dipole scattering probability at $`t_0`$ is $`\gamma (x,y)`$, the total scattering probability is given by

$$N(x_0,y_0,t)=\underset{m}{}[\mathrm{\Pi }_{i=1}^m\gamma (x_i,y_i)]n_m(x_0,y_0,t_0|x_1,y_1;\mathrm{};x_m,y_m).$$
(11)
The scattering probability $`\gamma `$ depends on the target, but not on the rapidity.

The account of multiple scatterings in the BK resummation eliminates the leading mechanism that renders the BFKL evolution nonunitary. Since the scattering probability in the BK evolution is no longer proportional to the gluon density, the scattering probability at any impact parameter does not exceed unity. This is obvious from eq.(9). When the scattering probability $`N(x,y)`$ reaches unity at all impact parameters, the right hand side of the evolution equation vanishes, and the probability stops growing.

A number of numerical  as well as analytical , studies of eq.(9) have been performed, and they all lead to the following consistent picture: Suppose one starts the evolution from the initial condition of small target fields (or $`N(x,y)1`$ for all $`x,y`$). Then initially the evolution follows the BFKL equation, since the nonlinear term in eq. (9) is negligible. As the scattering probability approaches unity, the nonlinear term kicks in and eventually the growth stops as the RHS of eq.(9) vanishes for $`N(x,y)=1`$. The larger dipoles (large $`(xy)^2`$) saturate earlier, with the smaller dipoles following at later ”time” $`t`$. The following simple parametrization  of the scattering probability gives an adequate description of the evolution

$$N(x,y)=1\mathrm{exp}\{(xy)^2Q_s^2(t)\}$$
(12)
with the saturation momentum $`Q_s(t)`$ a growing function of rapidity. Thus at any given value of rapidity, all pairs of size greater than $`Q_s^1(t)`$ are saturated.

The exact dependence of $`Q_s`$ on rapidity is not known, but both, the numerical results , and simple theoretical estimates , are consistent with the exponential growth of the form

$$Q_s(t)=\mathrm{\Lambda }\mathrm{exp}\{\alpha _s\lambda t\}$$
(13)
with $`\lambda `$ of order unity. This physical picture has been anticipated several years ago in .

Does saturation of the scattering probability locally in impact parameter plane necessarily imply that the total cross section unitarizes and satisfies the Froissart bound? The answer clearly is negative. The Froissart bound states that the inelastic cross section for the scattering of a hadron (dipole) on a hadronic target can not grow faster than the square of rapidity

$$\sigma <\frac{\pi }{m^2}t^2,$$
(14)
where $`m`$ is the mass of the lightest hadronic excitation. To calculate the inelastic cross section one has to integrate the scattering probability over the impact parameter. Thus, in the saturation regime

$$\sigma =\pi R^2(t),$$
(15)
where $`R(t)`$ is the size of the region in the transverse plane in which the scattering probability for hadronic size ”dipoles” is unity. This radius itself depends on $`t`$. To satisfy the Froissart bound the radius $`R(t)`$ should grow at most linearly with $`t`$. The question of unitarity is therefore the question about the rate of growth of the ”black” region, and thus is completely separate from the question of saturation of the scattering probability at fixed impact parameter.

As an aside we note that for the Deeply Inelastic Scattering the unitarity bound is somewhat different. In this case the projectile is a virtual photon. It does not have a fixed hadronic size, but rather is characterized by a distribution of dipole sizes. The perturbative wave function of the virtual photon is well known. An interesting property of this wave function is that for transverse photon it has a long tail on the small dipole side ($`r^2<<Q^2`$)

$$\mathrm{\Phi }^2(r)\alpha _{em}\frac{1}{r^2}.$$
(16)
In such a projectile not all dipoles saturate at the same energy. The scattering probability thus is given by the integral over the dipole sizes. At every rapidity the main contribution comes from the dipoles which are saturated, that is those with sizes above $`Q_s^1(t)`$. The scattering probability for a virtual photon at high energy (by high we mean here such that $`Q_s>>Q`$), is given by

$$N(\gamma ^{})=_{r^2<Q_s^2}d^2r\mathrm{\Phi }^2(r)\alpha _{em}\mathrm{ln}Q_s/Q.$$
(17)
With the exponential dependence of $`Q_s`$ on rapidity this translates into333Although this is entirely academic, we note that this expression is valid only at energies below $`s_c`$ such that $`\alpha _{em}\alpha _s\mathrm{ln}s_c/s_0<1`$. Above this energy higher order electromagnetic corrections must become important so that $`N(\gamma ^{})`$ saturates.

$$N(\gamma ^{})\alpha _{em}\alpha _s\mathrm{ln}s/s_0,$$
(18)
and therefore

$$\sigma _{DIS}\alpha _{em}\alpha _s\pi R^2(t)t.$$
(19)
Thus the DIS cross section has an extra power of $`t`$ relative to the cross section of a purely hadronic process. This extra power of $`t`$ is consistent with the numerical results of . The basic question of unitarization however remains the same: what is the dependence of $`R`$ on rapidity ?

While there is no doubt that QCD is a unitary theory, and therefore indeed $`R(t)t`$, there is no guarantee that the nonlinear BK equation eqs.(32),(9) preserves this property. In fact simple considerations indicate the opposite. This is especially clear from Kovchegov’s derivation  (see also ) where the density of dipoles in the projectile wavefunction is explicitly determined by the BFKL equation. Saturation is the result of the multiple scattering of the dense dipole system, rather than the slowdown in the growth of the dipole density. Since the transverse size of a system in BFKL evolution grows exponentially with rapidity, there is little doubt that the BK evolution violates unitarity of the total cross section.

We now present a simple calculation that establishes this point:

Consider the BK evolution as the evolution of the projectile ,. Suppose at the initial energy the projectile is a colour dipole of size $`x_0`$. It scatters on a hadronic target of size $`R_0`$. As the energy is increased, the projectile wave function evolves according to the BFKL equation. At rapidity $`t`$ the density of dipoles of size $`x`$ at transverse distance $`r`$ from the original dipole is given by the BFKL expression (see for example ):

$$n(x_0,x,b,t)=\frac{32}{x^2}\frac{\mathrm{ln}\frac{16b^2}{x_0x}}{(\pi a^2t)^{3/2}}\mathrm{exp}\{\omega t\mathrm{ln}\frac{16b^2}{x_0x}\frac{\mathrm{ln}^2\frac{16b^2}{x_0x}}{a^2t}\}$$
(20)
with $`\omega =4\mathrm{ln}2N_c\alpha _s/\pi `$ and $`a^2=14\zeta (3)N_c\alpha _s/\pi `$ and $`\zeta (n)`$ being the Riemann zeta-function.

Once the density of dipoles at some impact parameter $`b`$ becomes larger than some fixed critical number, the scattering probability at this impact parameter saturates. The exact value of this number depends on the target, but importantly it does not depend on rapidity. Thus the total cross section is given by the square of the largest impact parameter at which the dipole density in the projectile wave function is of order unity. In order to estimate this directly from eq. (20), we choose the dipole size $`x`$ in (20) as $`x=Q_s^1(t_0)`$. Recall that according to eq.(12), the dipole of this size scatters with probability one, if it hits inside the radius of the target $`R_0`$ (in this view of the evolution only the projectile wave function depends on energy, while the properties of the target at $`t`$ are the same as at $`t_0`$). Thus if at some impact parameter $`R(t)`$ the density of dipoles of size $`Q_s^1(t_0)`$ is unity, the scattering probability at this impact parameter is unity as well, see Fig. 3. Requiring the exponential in eq.(20) to vanish we obtain

$$R^2(t)=\frac{1}{16}\frac{x_0}{Q_s(t_0)}\mathrm{exp}\{\frac{\alpha _sN_c}{2\pi }ϵt\}$$
(21)
with

$$\frac{\alpha _sN_c}{2\pi }ϵ=\frac{a^2}{2}[1+\sqrt{1+4\frac{\omega }{a^2}}].$$
(22)
Numerically we find

$$\frac{\alpha _sN_c}{2\pi }ϵ=.87\omega .$$
(23)
Thus, as claimed we arrive at the exponential growth of the total cross section.

The exact value of $`ϵ`$ given in eqs.(22,23) should not be taken too seriously. The point is that the explicit form of the dipole density eq.(20) was derived by a saddle point integration, and as such is valid only for $`\mathrm{ln}\frac{16b^2}{x_0x}<\alpha _st`$. Since this condition is not satisfied by eq.(21), we can not strictly speaking use the saddle point expression eq. (20). This ambiguity however affects only the numerical value of $`ϵ`$ and not the parametric dependence in eq. (21). The reason is that even beyond the saddle point approximation the density has the form

$$n(x_0,x,b,t)\frac{1}{x^2}\mathrm{exp}\{\alpha _stF(\frac{\mathrm{ln}\frac{16b^2}{x_0x}}{\alpha _st})\}.$$
(24)
The relevant condition is $`F=0`$, and thus the solution parametrically must be the same as eq. (21).

It is important to realize, that although we use the BFKL dipole density of eq.(20), our argument does not assume that the scattering probability at $`R(t)`$ is dominated by one pomeron exchange. The only assumption is, that parametrically the total unitarized probability is the same as the one pomeron one. We use the criterion of dipole density only as an indicator for the magnitude of the total probability. The total scattering probability is given by

$$P(b)=\underset{m=1}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}\gamma _m(x,r)P_m(x_0,x,b,t),$$
(25)
where $`P_m(x_0,x,b,t)`$ is the probability to find in the projectile wave function $`m`$ dipoles of size $`x`$ at transverse coordinate $`b`$ within the area of the target radius $`R_0`$ and $`\gamma _m`$ is the probability of the scattering of an $`m`$-dipole state. In fact one should also sum over all dipole sizes smaller than $`R_0`$. We have neglected this summation in eq.(25) thus somewhat underestimating the total probability. Since $`\gamma _m\gamma `$, the probability is bounded from below as

$$P(b)\gamma \underset{m=1}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}P_m(x_0,x,b,t).$$
(26)
For dipoles of size $`Q_s^1`$, the scattering probability $`\gamma `$ is of order unity. Thus the only condition that we use is

$$\underset{m=1}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}P_m(x_0,x,b,t)=O(1)$$
(27)
whenever

$$n(x_0,x,b,t)=\underset{m=1}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}mP_m(x_0,x,b,t)=O(1).$$
(28)
The only way this condition can be violated, is if the wave function is dominated (with exponential accuracy !) by the trivial configuration with no dipoles, even when the average dipole number is one. Although the dipole model wave function is known to have relatively large fluctuations, there is nothing in its known properties  to suggest such an extreme behaviour. In fact for the explicit exponential model used in  our condition clearly holds.

To summarize, in the target rest frame, the violation of unitarity by the BK evolution can be understood as follows: Start with a single dipole scattering on the hadronic target of transverse size $`R_0`$. With increasing energy the projectile dipole emits additional dipoles strictly according to the BFKL evolution. The density as well as the transverse size of the projectile state thus grows. The increase in density leads to increasing importance of multiple scatterings which are properly accounted for in the BK derivation. This ensures that the scattering probability saturates locally. In the saturation regime, as long as the size of the projectile state $`R(t)`$ is smaller than the target size $`R_0`$, the cross section grows essentially only due to surface effects,

$$\sigma =\pi R_0^2+2\pi R_0x_0\mathrm{exp}\left[\frac{\alpha _sN_c}{2\pi }ϵt\right].$$
(29)
As long as $`\frac{\alpha _sN_c}{2\pi }ϵt<\mathrm{ln}\frac{R_0}{x_0}`$, the cross section is practically geometrical. However once the energy is high enough, so that the projectile size is larger than that of the target, the total cross section is determined by the former and grows exponentially with rapidity according to eq. (21). Thus at rapidities

$$t>\frac{1}{\alpha _sN_c}\mathrm{ln}\frac{R_0}{x_0},$$
(30)
the BK evolution is nonunitary and can not be applied.

This also illustrates that the applicability of the BK evolution crucially depends on the nature of the target. If the target is thick enough, so that the multiple scatterings become important before the growth of the projectile radius does, and if the target is wide enough, so that saturation occurs before the projectile radius swells beyond that of the target, then there is an intermediate regime in which the inelastic cross section remains practically constant and equal to $`\pi R_0^2`$. Then BK applies in this intermediate regime. However, if the target is a nucleon, neither one of these conditions is satisfied. Thus the tainted infrared behaviour of the BFKL evolution of the projectile will show up right away and will invalidate the application of the BK equation.

## 4 The target evolution picture

The BK equation (9) is valid only in the leading approximation in $`1/N_c`$. Beyond the leading order the evolution for a dipole cross section does not close, but rather is the first in the infinite hierarchy of equations. This hierarchy was derived in . It is useful to consider its interpretation in the frame where all the energy resides in the target. In this frame further increase in energy leads to growth of the target gluon fields. The evolution equation governs the change in the distribution of the gluon fields $`A_\mu `$ in the wave function of the target. In the particular gauge used in , the largest component of the vector potential is $`A^+`$. In this gauge the S-matrix for scattering of a fast fundamental projectile on the target fields is given by the unitary eikonal factor $`U(x)`$

$$U(x)=P\mathrm{exp}\{i𝑑x^{}T^aA_a^+(x)\},$$
(31)
where $`T^a`$ are the generators of the $`SU(N)`$ group in the fundamental representation. The first in the hierarchy of evolution equations derived in  is

$`{\displaystyle \frac{d}{dt}}\mathrm{Tr}<1U^{}(x)U(y)>={\displaystyle \frac{\alpha _s}{2\pi ^2}}{\displaystyle d^2z\frac{(xy)^2}{(xz)^2(yz)^2}}`$
$`\times N_c\mathrm{Tr}[U^{}(x)U(y)]\mathrm{Tr}[U^{}(x)U(z)]\mathrm{Tr}[U^{}(z)U(y)].`$ (32)
The averaging in eq. (32) is taken over the ensemble of field strengths characterizing the target, i.e., over the target wave function. In the large $`N_c`$ limit the averages in eq. (32) factorize and one recovers eq.(9) with the identification

$$N(x,y)=\frac{1}{N_c}\mathrm{Tr}\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}1}U^{}(x)U(y).$$
(33)
A physically appealing reformulation of Balitsky’s hierarchy of equations was given by Weigert  in terms of a nonlinear stochastic process. The unitary scattering amplitude $`U`$ evolves under the action of a stochastic source

$`{\displaystyle \frac{dU(x)}{dt}}`$ $`=`$ $`gU(x)iT^a{\displaystyle \frac{d^2z}{\sqrt{4\pi ^3}}\frac{(xz)_i}{(xz)^2}\left[1\stackrel{~}{U}^{}(x)\stackrel{~}{U}(z)\right]^{ab}\xi _i^b(z)}`$ (34)
$`{\displaystyle \frac{i\alpha _s}{2\pi ^2}}{\displaystyle d^2z\frac{1}{(xz)^2}\mathrm{Tr}[T^a\stackrel{~}{U}^{}(x)\stackrel{~}{U}(z)]},`$
where $`U(x)`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{U}(x)`$ are the unitary matrices (31) in the fundamental and adjoint representations, respectively. The white noise $`\xi `$ is characterised by Gaussian local correlations

$$\xi _i^a(t^{},z^{})\xi _j^b(t^{\prime \prime },z^{\prime \prime })=\delta ^{ab}\delta _{ij}\delta (t^{}t^{\prime \prime })\delta (z^{}z^{\prime \prime }).$$
(35)
This Langevin equation gives rise to an infinite number of equations for correlators of $`U`$ which coincide with those derived in .

Consider then the Langevin equation formulation, eq. (34). Assume that at the initial rapidity $`t_0`$ the target is black within radius $`R_0`$. This means that for $`|z|<R_0`$ the matrix $`U(z)`$ fluctuates very strongly so that it covers the whole group space. Let us concentrate on the point $`x`$ which is initially outside of this black region. The matrix $`U(x)`$ then is close to unity. Thus there is no correlation between $`U(x)`$ and $`U(z)`$, and the second and third terms on the right hand side of eq. (34) can be set to zero. This is the random phase approximation introduced in  and used later in . Note that this approximation does not linearize the evolution. Rather it corresponds to equating the nonlinear term in eq.(9) to unity for $`z`$ in the black region.

As the target field ensemble evolves in rapidity, the radius of the black region grows. As long as the point $`x`$ stays outside the black region, we can approximate the Langevin equation by

$$\frac{d}{dt}U(x)=\sqrt{\frac{\alpha _sN_c}{2\pi ^2}}_{|z|<R}d^2z\frac{(xz)_i}{(xz)^2}\xi _i(z).$$
(36)
Here we did not indicate explicitly colour indices, since they are inessential to the argument. We have also neglected the contribution to the derivative of $`U`$ that comes from gluons originating from the sources outside the black region. Those contributions speed up the growth of $`U`$, and so by omitting them we can only underestimate the rate of growth of the radius of the black region. The formal solution of equation (36) is,

$$1U(x,t)=\sqrt{\frac{\alpha _sN_c}{2\pi ^2}}_{t_0}^t𝑑\tau _{|z|<R(\tau )}d^2z\frac{(xz)_i}{(xz)^2}\xi _i(z).$$
(37)
Squaring it and averaging over the noise term gives

$$(1U(x,t))^2=\frac{\alpha _sN_c}{2\pi ^2}_{t_0}^t𝑑\tau _{|z|<R(\tau )}d^2z\frac{1}{(xz)^2}.$$
(38)
As long as $`x`$ is outside the black region and $`|x|>R`$, we can approximate the integral on the right hand side by

$$_{|z|<R(\tau )}d^2z\frac{1}{(xz)^2}=\pi \frac{R^2(\tau )}{x^2},$$
(39)
and eq.(38) becomes

$$(1U(x,t))^2=\frac{\alpha _sN_c}{2\pi }\frac{1}{x^2}_{t_0}^t𝑑\tau R^2(\tau ).$$
(40)
As the black region grows, eventually it will reach the point $`x`$. At this rapidity the matrix $`U(x)`$ starts fluctuating with an amplitude of order one. Thus, when $`R(t)=|x|`$, the left hand side of eq. (40) becomes a number of order one, which we call $`1/ϵ`$. We thus have an approximate equation for $`R(t)`$,

$$\frac{1}{ϵ}R^2(t)=\frac{\alpha _sN_c}{2\pi }_{t_0}^t𝑑\tau R^2(\tau ),$$
(41)
or in the differential form

$$\frac{d}{dt}R(t)=\frac{\alpha _sN_c}{4\pi }ϵR(t).$$
(42)
At large rapidities therefore the radius of the black region is exponentially large

$$R(t)=R(t_0)\mathrm{exp}\{\frac{\alpha _sN_c}{4\pi }ϵ(tt_0)\}.$$
(43)
We thus recover the result of the previous section.

The approximations leading to eq. (42) are not strictly speaking valid when the point $`x`$ is on the boundary of the black region. First, eq. (39) is an underestimate of the integral, since the inequality $`|x|R`$ no longer holds. However, this approximation can lead only to an underestimate of the rate of growth of $`R`$. Second, not for all points $`z`$ in the black region the term $`U(x)U^{}(z)`$ in eq.(34) can be dropped. This however is also unimportant, since when $`x`$ is on the boundary of the black region, although the factor $`(1U(x)U^{}(z))`$ is not striclty unity, it is still of order one for all points $`z`$. It is in fact different from unity only for points $`z`$ in the vicinity of $`x`$. Thus, although we can not determine the exact numerical value of $`ϵ`$, the functional form of the solution as well as its parametric dependence is given correctly by eq. (43).

From the point of view of the evolution of target fields the violation of the unitarity can be interpreted as follows. The RHS of eq. (34) is nothing but the total Coulomb (Weizsäcker-Williams) field at point $`x`$ due to the colour charge sources at points $`z`$. The stochastic noise tells us that these colour sources are uncorrelated both in the transverse plane and in rapidity. For such random sources the square of the total colour charge is proportional to the area, and this is precisely the factor $`R^2`$ in eq. (40). The incoming dipole thus scatters on the Coulomb field created by a large incoherent colour charge. Because the Coulomb field is long range, the whole bulk of the region populated by the sources contributes to the evolution and leads to rapid growth of $`R`$. If the field created by the sources was screened by some mass, the evolution would be perfectly unitary. To illustrate this point, let us substitute the Coulomb field $`(xz)_i/(xz)^2`$ in eq. (34) by an exponentially decaying field $`m\mathrm{exp}\{m|xz|\}`$. It is straightforward to perform now the same analysis as before. Eq. (39) is now replaced by

$$_{|z|<R(\tau )}d^2zm^2\mathrm{exp}\{m|xz|\}=\mathrm{exp}\{m|xR|\}.$$
(44)
This leads to the substitution $`R^2\mathrm{exp}\{mR\}`$ in all subsequent equations with the end result that

$$R(t)=\alpha _s\frac{ϵ}{m}t,$$
(45)
which in fact saturates the Froissart bound.

Thus the reason for the violation of unitarity is that the evolution is driven by the emission of the long range Coulomb field from a large number of incoherent colour sources in the target.

To conclude this section we would like to discuss the relation of our results with numerical studies of the nonlinear QCD evolution. Studies within the framework of the dipole model were reported in . Ref.  does not deal directly with the nonlinear BK equations, but rather with the onium-onium scattering in the framework of the dipole model. However as is clear from our discussion at asymptotically high energies this distinction is irrelevant. The growth of the transverse size of the projectile eventually determines the behaviour of the cross section irrespective of the nature of the target. Indeed our results are in agreement with those of . The numerical results of  clearly indicate, that even though the scattering probability is unitarized locally in the impact parameter space, the total cross section keeps on growing exponentially with $`t`$ (Figs. 9 and 10 of ). From Fig. 10 of  we conclude that the power of the exponential is about $`.75\omega `$, where $`\omega `$ is the leading BFKL exponential. Interestingly, our rough estimate (23) is in reasonable qualitative agreement with this numerical result.

Our results eqs.(21,42) are in apparent contradiction with the conclusions of numerical work . The origin of this discrepancy is that these references solve eq. (9) within the local approximation, assuming that important contributions come only from the dipole sizes which are smaller than the impact parameter. Within this approximation the dependence on the impact parameter in eq. (9) becomes parametric, and the growth of the total cross section is determined entirely by the shape of the initial condition. The Froissart bound is then saturated for the exponential initial profile of $`N(b)`$. The physics here is simple. In the local approximation of  the gluon density of the target (and the scattering probability $`N`$) evolve at all impact parameters $`b`$ according to the same exact translationally invariant equation. The density locally grows at all impact parameters at the same rate. This rate is the same as the growth of the saturation momentum and is power like with rapidity, eq.(13). Thus if one starts from initial configuration with the exponential density profile $`g(b)=\mathrm{exp}\{b/R_0\}`$, after the evolution to rapidity $`t`$ it becomes

$$g(b,t)=\mathrm{exp}\{b/R_0+\alpha _s\lambda t\}.$$
(46)
The scattering probability on such a system is unity at impact parameters for which $`g(b)1`$. Thus the highest impact parameter that contributes to the total cross section at rapidity $`t`$ is $`b_{max}=\frac{\alpha _s\lambda }{R_0}t`$, and the cross section444In this discussion we neglect the dependence of $`N`$ on the size of the dipole. Strictly speaking such dependence is of course present, and it determines the rapidity at which the asymptotic behaviour of $`\sigma `$ sets in. The asymptotic form of $`\sigma `$ however is independent on the dipole size. is $`\sigma =\pi b_{max}^2t^2`$ . For initial Gaussian distribution on the other hand, the same argument leads to the linear growth of the cross section with $`t`$.

This feature, namely that the asymptotic form of $`\sigma `$ is determined by the initial distribution is clearly an artifact of the local approximation. The reason the local approximation leads to this behaviour, is that it neglects the effects of far away black regions (where $`N=1`$) on the scattering probability in the grey areas (where $`N<1`$). As is apparent from our analysis in eq.(36-40), it is precisely the effect of the far away black regions that drives the growth of the total cross section. This is due to the long range Coulomb fields originating in the central black region. In fact, the only contributions we kept on the RHS of eq.(36) are due to dipoles with sizes of the order of the impact parameter. In this respect our discussion is orthogonal to that of . It is clear from the comparison of our results to those of , that the effect of these long range fields on the total cross section is far greater than that of the local translationally invariant part of the evolution. Even if one starts from an exponential density profile, the full BK evolution generates power like and not exponential tails in the density at large $`t`$. These power like tails dominate the total cross section and lead to the universal exponential growth of $`\sigma `$ with rapidity. The local approximation is adequate for studying the behaviour of $`Q_s(t)`$ in the dense central region, as this is determined by local effects. It is however not a good approximation for the total cross section, which is dominated by the evolution of long range Coulomb fields.

## 5 One Pomeron, two Pomeron; hard Pomeron, soft Pomeron

The linear evolution of the projectile wave function inherent in the BK evolution is a direct consequence of the large $`N_c`$ limit. In this limit one can neglect the interactions between the dipoles in the projectile wave function. Individual Feynman diagrams which contain dipole-dipole interactions are suppressed by powers of $`1/N_c`$. Thus, the dipoles in the projectile wave function do not interact during the evolution and they scatter independently of each other. However, the number of interacting diagrams grows very fast with the number of interacting dipoles. As the number of dipoles in the wave function which can interact with each other becomes $`O(N)`$, the number of the suppressed diagrams becomes $`O(N^2)`$ and the suppression disappears. At high enough rapidity, where the dipole-dipole interactions are important, the evolution equation (9) breaks down and wave function saturation effects start to play an essential role. Although equation (32) contains some $`1/N_c`$ corrections, those are only ”group theoretical” corrections reflecting the fact that at finite $`N_c`$ a gluon is not strictly equivalent to a $`\overline{q}q`$ pair. It does not contain the corrections due to the interactions of gluons (or dipoles) in the projectile wave function.

The interaction probability of a dipole of size $`r`$ with another dipole of similar size in the projectile wave function is of the order $`\alpha _sr^2n(r)`$, while the probability of the direct interaction with the target is $`\gamma (r)`$. The multiple scattering corrections are thus more important as long as $`\alpha _sr^2n(r)\gamma (r)`$. The projectile wave function corrections become important as the density grows so that

$$r^2n(r)=\mathrm{exp}\{\omega t\}=\frac{\gamma }{\alpha _s}.$$
(47)
Assuming that for a large target $`\gamma `$ is of order one, this happens for rapidities

$$t\frac{1}{\omega }\mathrm{ln}1/\alpha _s\frac{1}{(N_c\alpha _s)}\mathrm{ln}1/\alpha _s.$$
(48)
The ”subleading” large $`N_c`$ nature of these corrections is clear if one traces back the explicit $`N_c`$ dependence of (48). In fact, the coupling constant $`\alpha _s`$ occurs in $`n(r)`$ only in the combination $`\alpha _sN_c`$, since the BFKL evolution neglects dipole-dipole interactions. Thus the $`\alpha _s`$ in the numerator of eq.(47) is explicitly subleading in $`N_c`$ and indeed accounts for dipole-dipole interactions.

The above illustrates that the BK resummation improves on the BFKL evolution when the target is dense, that is the scattering probability $`\gamma `$ is larger than order $`\alpha _s`$. On a large nucleus of atomic number $`A`$ one expects $`\gamma \alpha _sA^{1/3}`$, and thus in this case BK resumms all corrections in powers of $`\alpha _sA^{1/3}`$ . However even in this case the validity of the BK equation remains limited. The scattering probability $`\gamma `$ is only large at central impact parameters. At peripheral impact parameters the density in the target drops to zero, and so for the peripheral scattering events the applicability of BK is no better than that of BFKL. In particular, the diffusion contributions play the same role, since they are not associated with high partonic densities. Since at very high energies the total cross section is dominated by peripheral events, one does not expect the BK evolution to be a valid approximation in calculating the total cross section. Comparing eqs.(30) and (48) we conclude that for large targets, at rapidities at which the total cross section is dominated by peripheral impact parameters, the wave function saturation effects are important even for small projectiles. Thus even within perturbation theory, the wave function saturation effects are bound to be the ones that determine the growth of the total cross section with energy.

Could wave function saturation effects lead to a perturbative unitarization of the total cross section? As seen above, the violation of the Froissart bound in the BK approximation is due to large and incoherent colour charge fluctuations in the black region. If there was a mechanism to ensure strong correlations such that the total colour charge in a region of fixed size $`L`$ is zero, then the incoming dipole would feel the Coulomb field only within the fixed distance $`L`$ from the black region. Thus the new charges produced by the evolution would only ”split off” the edges of the black region rather than from its bulk. This scenario is equivalent to exponential decay of the field, and would lead to a unitary evolution, as expected for a confining theory like QCD. However, it does not seem plausible that this type of correlations can be enforced on the system by a perturbative mechanism, nor that perturbation theory can generate any kind of ”mass” for the gluons which would lead to exponential decay of gluon fields generated by sources in the black region. We thus expect that any perturbative corrections will generate power like tails of gluon density at large distances from the black region. The growth of these power tails with rapidity will inevitably lead to an exponential growth of the cross section.

We expect, however, that wave function saturation effects diminish the exponent $`ϵ`$ significantly relative to the BK value $`\frac{\alpha _sN_c}{2\pi }ϵ=.75\omega `$. The evolution equations derived in  go beyond the BK equation by including wave function saturation effects. They provide a well-defined perturbative framework for calculating this effect.

We have seen in the previous sections that QCD perturbation theory predicts the existence of two distinct physical mechanisms for the power growth of hadronic cross sections with energy. One is due to the fast growth of the partonic densities, while the other is due to expansion of hadronic states in the transverse plane. The first mechanism is the leading one for systems containing a small number of partons. When the partonic density reaches the critical value of order $`1/\alpha _s`$, further growth of the density is cut off by the perturbative saturation effects. The transverse expansion mechanism is however likely to survive in this situation, and thus it should become the leading driving force for the perturbative growth of cross sections in dense systems.

The first mechanism with the perturbative BFKL exponent of around $`.3.4`$ fits very nicely with the so called hard Pomeron utilized to fit the hadronic cross sections of small systems . The exponent due to the transverse expansion has not been calculated yet, although the equations which determine it have been derived in . Although we do not know yet the value of this exponent, we know for certain, that it is smaller than the BFKL one. One is naturally lead to ask whether this perturbative growth of the transverse size of saturated systems underlies the experimentally observed power growth of the cross sections in purely hadronic processes, like $`pp`$ and $`\overline{p}p`$. This type of expansion, and with it the power like growth of the cross section should cease at asymptotically high energies, where the perturbation theory must become invalid.

This picture suggests that nonperturbative effects are called for only in order to unitarize the cross section at asymptotically high energies, but not in order to furnish the mechanism for its fast growth in the pre-asymptotic regime. This is also natural from the following perspective. The Froissart-like behaviour is associated with the existence of a gap in the spectrum, as can be illustrated by a simple and intuitive argument due to Heisenberg . In a theory with a mass gap, the profile of the distribution of matter density in any target must decay exponentially at the periphery, $`\rho (b)\mathrm{exp}\{mb\}`$. As this target is struck by a projectile, in order to produce an inelastic scattering event at least one particle must be produced. Assuming that the scattering is local in the impact parameter plane, the region of the overlap of the probe and the target must therefore contain energy at least equal to the mass of the lightest particle, $`m`$. For scattering at energy $`E=s/m`$ in the frame where all the energy resides in the target, the target energy density is $`E\rho (b)`$. Thus the scattering can only take place for impact parameters smaller than those that satisfy $`E\mathrm{exp}\{mb\}=m`$. Thus $`b_{max}=\frac{1}{m}\mathrm{ln}\{s/m^2\}`$, which is equivalent to the Froissart bound. Conversely, if the cross section grows as a power of energy, then the density distribution in the target is not exponential but power like. With $`\rho (b)b^\lambda `$ one obtains $`b_{max}s^{\frac{1}{\lambda }}`$. Since the power growth of hadronic cross sections persists in a large interval of energies, one expects that for a range of impact parameters the density distribution in hadronic states is power like. Perturbation theory provides a natural explanation of such a power like distribution. The tails of perturbative distribution are due to massless gluon fields emitted from the colour charges in the target. Even though the target is neutral, it always possesses a multipole moment of some order, and thus perturbatively is always accompanied by a long range power like tail of massless gluon field.

The precondition for applicability of this perturbative mechanism in hadronic systems is that hadrons themselves are built from small ”black” building blocks. As explained earlier, the gluon fields at periphery are emitted from the bulk of the black disk, and not from its boundary. Thus, in order to explain the preasymptotic power like rise of hadronic cross sections by perturbative Coulomb like gluon fields, the radius of these black region must be smaller than the confining scale of QCD. It is in fact widely believed that QCD does naturally contain the scale of the right order - the scale associated with chiral symmetry breaking. In particular the radius of constituent quark is believed to be at most $`.3`$ fm and perhaps even smaller. This supports the phenomenological picture of the proton as a loosely bound system of three small constituent quarks. The nonperturbative confining force keeps these quarks confined within the spatial region of radius $`.8.9`$ fm.

A quantitative analysis of the non-linear evolution equations  which could substantiate our proposal of the perturbative soft pomeron, is not available yet. There are however some qualitative consequences of the above picture that can be compared to experimental data. Let us check first whether the value of the cross section in our model is in rough agreement with experiment. The total cross section of $`pp`$ scattering at the lowest energy where the Reggeon contributions are not important, $`\sqrt{s}50`$ GeV is $`45`$ mb. The total cross section for the scattering of two black disks of diameter $`d`$ is $`2\pi d^2`$. Thus in the simplest model in which the proton is composed of three completely “black” constituent quarks of diameter $`d`$, the total $`pp`$ cross section is $`3\times 3\times 2\pi d^2`$. Equating this to $`45mb`$ we find $`d=.28`$ fm. This should be considered as a lower bound on the value of $`d`$. It is more likely that the constituent quarks are only black in the center and have grey peripheral regions, see Fig. 5. For peripheral $`qq`$ events the scattering occurs with probability $`f<1`$. Incorporating this roughly as an average “greyness” factor in the formula for the cross section gives $`d=.28f^{1/2}`$ fm. For $`f=.5`$ we have $`d=.4`$ fm. We may thus think of the proton as a collection of three loosely bound constituent quarks each described by a disk of $`d=.3.4`$ fm which is essentially black in its center but grey at its boundary, see Fig. 5.

This picture is quite remarkable, since the ”active” area inside the proton in our model is much smaller than the proton radius and thus one may have worried that the model will underestimate the total cross section. This however does not happen. Further support for this picture comes from the ratio $`\frac{\sigma _{\pi p}}{\sigma pp}`$ which is very close to $`2/3`$. The pomeron contributions to the total hadronic cross sections are parametrized as $`\sigma _{pp}=21.70s^{0.808}`$ and $`\sigma _{\pi p}=13.63s^{0.808}`$ . This is consistent with $`\pi `$ having two constituent quarks.

Another feature of the model is that although the quarks are black, the proton itself is not. Thus we expect the ratio of the elastic to total cross section to be well below the black disk value of $`1/2`$. The experimental value of this ratio at $`\sqrt{s}=50`$ Gev is indeed just below $`1/5`$ .

Another global characteristics of the scattering is the radius of the proton as measured via the shrinkage of the elastic peak, $`\frac{d\sigma _{el}}{dt}\mathrm{exp}\{\frac{R^2}{4}t\}`$. For the elastic $`pp`$ scattering this gives the value of $`R`$ consistent with the proton radius $`R=.8`$ fm . Again at first sight this sounds like trouble, since it is much larger than the radius of a constituent quark. However one should realize that the radius of the individual quark is not relevant for this particular quantity. The process is elastic if the proton as a whole emerges from the interaction intact. Thus indeed it is the radius of the proton and not of a quark that should determine the $`t`$-dependence of the elastic cross section in our model. The radius of the quark may emerge in a similar way in the processes ”elastic” with respect to individual constituent quark scattering. Whether one can define a subset of final states that correspond to such a process is an interesting question, but at present it is not clear to us how to do it.

The picture of the proton as built from three small constituent quark was envoked in the nonperturbative model for the high energy scattering in . The physics of  is however quite different from that of our proposal. The quarks themselves in  are not thought of as being black, and the growth of the quark-quark cross section is due to the increase of the density of the gluon cloud surrounding an individual quark, rather than to the increase in its transverse size. Ref.  also appeals to the scale of $`.3`$ fermi although not explicitly in connection with the size of constituent quarks. Again, however the mechanism of the growth of the cross section in  appears to be the same as the leading BFKL mechanism, that is the growth of gluonic density. The role of instanton effects in  is to limit the gluon emissions only to within the transverse sizes smaller than $`.3`$ fermi, and thus to cut off the expansion in the transverse plane. In contrast our picture assumes that nonperturbative effects (perhaps instantons) are responsible for the buildup of a black gluon cloud around each quark at low energy. The subsequent evolution in energy is dominated by perturbative swelling of these black regions. Eventually, when the size of the quarks reaches confining scale, other nonperturbative effects kick in and cut off further power like growth of the cross section. The physics of these nonperturbative effects is presumably the physics of confinement.

We note also that the two distinct physical mechanisms for two pomerons have a consequence that they will appear with different probability in different processes. For example in $`pp`$ scattering there are rare proton configurations which do not have the typical hadronic structure, but contain quarks closely bunched together in coordinate space. Those are the configurations responsible for the colour transparency effects in the hadronic scattering . These configurations are rare and short lived. Thus they do not have time to develop the gluon clouds around the quarks that could make them ”black”. These configurations will predominantly evolve towards the increase in density, and thus will have energy dependence of the hard pomeron. This is consistent with the findings of  that hard pomeron is present already in purely hadronic processes.

On the other hand one does not necessarily expect the soft pomeron to appear in DIS even at low $`Q^2`$. The reason is that even though at low $`Q^2`$ the DIS cross section has large contributions from the photon fluctuations into the states of hadronic size, these states do not live long enough on hadronic time scale, and thus do not have time to develop dense gluon clouds around the quarks. The energy dependence of such large but dilute states would then be of the hard pomeron nature. This appears to be consistent with the recent results which do not require the soft pomeron to fit DIS data even at very small $`Q^2`$ .

Perhaps the most appealing feature of this scenario is that it gives hope to understand the soft pomeron within the well defined, bona fide perturbative framework. The equations that resum the wave function saturation effects has been derived in . Even though their numerical study is probably much more involved than that of eqs.(9,32), we think the question is interesting enough to motivate such an undertaking.

Acknowledgements This work has been supported in part by PPARC. U.A.W. thanks the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Plymouth for hospitality while part of this work was being done. We are indebted to J.G. Milhano and H Weigert for interesting discussions during the early stages of this work. We also thank M. Braun, Yu. Kovchegov, E. Levin and K. Tuchin for useful discussions and correspondence.


format: text

text:
# Fiber-coupled Antennas for Ultrafast Coherent Terahertz Spectroscopy in Low Temperatures and High Magnetic Fields

## Abstract

For the purposes of measuring the high-frequency complex conductivity of correlated-electron materials at low temperatures and high magnetic fields, a method is introduced for performing coherent time-domain terahertz spectroscopy directly in the cryogenic bore of existing dc and pulsed magnets. Miniature fiber-coupled THz emitters and receivers are constructed and are demonstrated to work down to 1.5 Kelvin and up to 17 Tesla, for eventual use in higher-field magnets. Maintaining the sub-micron alignment between fiber and antenna during thermal cycling, obtaining ultrafast ($`<200`$ fs) optical gating pulses at the end of long optical fibers, and designing highly efficient devices that work well with low-power optical gating pulses constitute the major technical challenges of this project. Data on a YBCO superconducting thin film and a high mobility 2D electron gas is shown.

Introduction

Time-domain terahertz spectroscopy is an established technique for the measurement of high-frequency conductivity, typically in the range between 100 GHz and $``$3000 GHz. Pioneered in the late 1980s, “table-top” terahertz spectrometers employing photoconductive antennas gated by ultrafast optical pulses have been used to study a wide range of material systems, including semiconductors and dielectrics, normal and high-$`T_c`$ superconductors, liquids, flames, and gases. This THz frequency range lies between that which is readily accessible by microwave cavity techniques (on the low frequency side), and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopies (on the high frequency side). These frequencies correspond to energies between 0.4 meV and $``$12 meV, or alternatively, temperatures between 4K and 140K and magnetic fields between 4 Tesla and 100 Tesla.

This is precisely the energy, temperature, and in particular the magnetic field scale relevant to many novel correlated-electron systems of interest today, including high-$`T_c`$ superconductors (where the upper critical field $`H_{c2}`$ corresponds to tens or even hundreds of Tesla), heavy-fermion and Kondo-insulating materials (where, e.g., the Kondo spin/charge gap in Ce3Bi4Pt3 may be closed above 30 T), colossal magnetoresistive manganites (melting of charge/orbital order at high fields), 2D electron gases (composite fermion dynamics in the high-field fractional quantum Hall regime), and organic metals (novel field-induced superconductivity above 17 T). Thus it is of keen interest to perform measurements of the complex THz conductivity not only in the regime of low temperatures, but also at high magnetic fields. However, the conventional “table-top” transmission terahertz spectrometer is a rather involved and physically large setup, typically utilizing several micropositioning stages to align the THz antennas with respect to the free-space laser beams, and off-axis parabolic optics to collimate and focus the terahertz pulses over short distances. These traditional methods work extremely well, but are not compatible with high-field magnets (10-60 T), which are generally solenoids with narrow, cryogenic bores accessible primarily via meters-long experimental probes.

To this end we have developed extremely sensitive, miniaturized, optical fiber-coupled THz emitters and receivers for remote use directly in the low-temperature bore of a high-field (dc or pulsed) magnet. These devices permit ultrafast, coherent, time-domain THz transmission spectroscopy of samples in the frequency range between 100 GHz and $``$2000 GHz. Due to the coherent nature of the detection (both amplitude and phase of the THz electric field are measured), the complex conductivity may be directly evaluated without the need for Kramers-Kronig analyses, in contrast with phase-incoherent schemes based on thermal cyclotron emission. The gated nature of the detection permits high signal-to-noise data with minimal ($``$2 mW) optical power input and, where necessary, the ability to acquire complete spectra in tens of milliseconds. The primary challenges of this project include maintaining sub-micron alignment between fiber and antenna upon repeated thermal cycling, achieving ultrafast ($`<200`$ fs) optical pulses at the end of tens of meters of singlemode optical fiber, and obtaining complete time-domain scans with high signal-to-noise ratio using only milliwatts of optical power, no lock-in detection, and (for pulsed magnets) only $``$100 ms of integration time.

Experimental setup

Using photoconductive antennas, wide-bandwidth THz pulses may only be generated (and detected) by gating the antennas with ultrafast optical pulses, and for this reason it is necessary to compensate for the positive group-velocity dispersion (GVD) of optical fibers so that fast optical pulses may be obtained at the ends of long fibers. Normal silica optical fiber exhibits a GVD of roughly 120 fs/m-nm at 800 nm, so that without compensation, a 100 fs input optical pulse with a bandwidth of 10 nm broadens, in the best case, to $`>20`$ picoseconds after a typical 20 meter length of fiber. Such a lengthy optical pulse is useless for generating or detecting THz radiation. Thus it is necessary to precompensate and impose a negative chirp on the optical pulses before launching into the optical fibers, so that the optical pulses shorten in time as they travel through the fiber and achieve a minimum value right at the THz devices.

The experimental schematic for THz transmission spectroscopy in high-field magnets is illustrated in Fig. 1. Ultrafast optical pulses (100 fs, centered at 800 nm) from a commercial Ti:sapphire laser are directed to a two-grating pulse stretcher, which imparts a negative chirp (blue wavelengths leading red wavelengths) onto the pulses. The magnitude of the negative chirp, tuned via the separation between the two gratings G1 and G2 (1200 grooves/mm), is chosen to optimally compensate for the intrinsic positive GVD of optical fiber, and thus depends on the laser wavelength and the length of fiber used. For typical fiber lengths of 20 meters, the 100 fs, transform-limited pulses are stretched to approximately 24 picoseconds. After leaving the pulse stretcher, the negatively-chirped pulse train is equally split into an “emitter” and a “receiver” beam. The former is launched directly into a singlemode optical fiber, while the latter is delayed by a scanning retroreflector before being launched into another singlemode fiber of equal length. As the optical pulses travel from the laboratory to the low-temperature probe housing the THz antennas, their temporal width decreases due to the positive GVD of the fiber, achieving a minimum pulsewidth directly at the lithographically-defined photoconductive antennas. The minimum pulsewidth depends critically on pulse energy, fiber length, and stretcher position as discussed in detail below. The receiver’s fiber passes through a polarization controller (PC), as it was found that the signal amplitude depends slightly ($`\pm 15\%`$) on the polarization of the optical pulses incident on the THz receiver.

In an experiment, the sample of interest is positioned between the THz emitter and receiver in the cryogenic bore of the magnet. Following the usual prescription, an ultrafast optical pulse promotes mobile carriers in the biased stripline emitter, and the subsequent current surge generates a burst of broadband THz radiation which is coupled into free space through a silicon hyperhemispherical substrate lens of radius 2-5 mm. The height of the substrate lens is chosen to collimate the THz radiation. After passing through the sample, the THz pulse is focussed onto the stripline receiver by another substrate lens, where the “instantaneous” THz electric field is gated by a second ultrafast optical pulse, generating a measurable current. The complete time-dependent THz electric field is mapped by rapidly scanning the time delay between the excitation and gating optical pulses, and the amplified current signal is sent directly to a digitizing oscilloscope. Photographs of a fiber-coupled antenna and of the actual apparatus are shown in Figure 2. The THz emitter and receiver are mounted facing one another with a gap of roughly 1 cm. The emitter bias is provided by twisted-pair leads and external batteries (10-20 V, typically). The detected photocurrent is coupled from the receiver to an external current amplifier (DL Instruments model 1212) via a micro-coaxial cable selected for its low loss and insensitivity to microphonic noise. A rotating copper sample stage enables the sample to be moved out of the THz beam path, so that a reference scan (crucial for quantitative interpretation of data) may be taken at each new temperature or field. Temperature control is provided by a Cernox thermometer in the sample stage and a wire heater on the body of the probe. The entire probe is 25 mm in diameter, and may be used in vacuum, vapor, or liquid helium environments .

Pulse dispersion management in long fibers

The power and bandwidth of the generated THz radiation is strongly influenced by the temporal width of the ultrafast optical pulses that are used to gate the antennas. Fig. 3 shows the signal ($``$ THz electric field) for a fiber-coupled emitter/receiver pair that are driven by 800 nm optical pulses of constant energy (26 pJ/pulse), but varying pulsewidth. Here, the optical pulsewidth at the antennas is varied between 175 fs and 1300 fs by changing the spacing between the gratings in the pulse stretcher. The effects are immediately clear: Both the amplitude and bandwidth of the measured THz radiation decrease as the temporal width of the optical gating pulses is increased from the minimum value of 175 fs. The drop in power is particularly marked at higher frequencies; e.g., above 800 GHz the power spectrum of the THz pulses (Fig. 3b) decreases over an order of magnitude.

After propagating through a typical length of 10-20 m of optical fiber, the minimum temporal width of an optical pulse is always somewhat larger than the original 100 fs, even when the positive GVD of the optical fiber is optimally balanced by the pulse stretcher. The main reasons for this are uncompensated cubic phase dispersion in the stretcher/fiber system, and self-phase modulation (SPM) in the optical fiber. Quadratic, cubic, and higher-order phase dispersion of an optical pulse in fiber arises simply because the index of refraction of silica (or any material) is not constant with wavelength, and thus different wavelengths within a broadband ultrafast optical pulse travel with different group velocities. Whereas the negative quadratic phase dispersion (GVD) imparted by the pulse stretcher may be tuned to exactly cancel the positive quadratic phase dispersion of the fiber, both the stretcher and the fiber impart a small cubic phase dispersion onto the optical pulse, and these contributions do not cancel. Indeed, it is only by rather involved design, or via the inclusion of phase-shifting optics, that cubic phase dispersion may be compensated. For the purposes of generating and detecting THz radiation, the pulse broadening due to cubic phase dispersion does not degrade the signal significantly to warrant correction, although for longer lengths of fiber ($`>50`$ m) correction may be necessary.

Self-phase modulation, on the other hand, is an inherently nonlinear optical phenomenon arising from an intensity-dependent phase shift, whose effect is to redistribute energy within an optical pulse to different spectral components. Thus, unlike the linear effects of GVD (quadratic) or cubic phase dispersion, SPM acts to create or remove additional wavelengths within the optical pulse. Because SPM in fibers arises from the high instantaneous power in ultrafast optical pulses, it may be minimized by using very low-power pulses, typically of order 30 pJ or less for 100 fs pulses.

The combined effects of SPM, cubic phase dispersion, pulse power, and stretcher position on the optical pulsewidth are shown in Figure 4. Here, prechirped 100 fs low-power (closed circles) and high-power (open circles) optical pulses centered at 800 nm are launched into 20 meters of optical fiber, and the temporal width of the pulses at the end of the fiber is measured as a function of stretcher position. The pulsewidth is measured via autocorrelation and a $`sech^2(t)`$ pulse shape is assumed. At one extreme, when the distance between the two stretcher gratings is 15 mm longer than the optimum separation of 160 mm, the pulses are “overstretched”, and therefore never achieve their minimum value in the optical fiber (i.e., the pulses are still somewhat negatively chirped at the fiber exit). As the distance between the gratings is decreased, the pulses exit the fiber with shorter and shorter pulsewidth until an optimum position is reached and the GVD of the fiber is exactly compensated. Further decreasing the distance between the gratings results in “understretched” pulses, where the minimum pulsewidth is achieved somewhere within the optical fiber (rather than at the end). Note that the minimum pulsewidth for the low-power pulses (250 fs) is larger than the 100 fs input pulsewidth. Since further reduction of the pulse energy has very little effect on the shape of this curve (not shown), the 250 fs pulsewidth is due to the uncompensated cubic phase dispersion of the stretcher-fiber combination (also, similar experiments in 10, 5, and 1 meter fibers show that the minimum pulsewidth approaches 100 fs).

More interesting are the data from the high-power pulses, which exhibit a much larger minimum pulsewidth of 700 fs (and, this minimum value occurs at a slightly different position of the stretcher). In this case, the effects of nonlinear SPM, arising from the large instantaneous intensity of the high-power pulse, actually narrows the spectral bandwidth of the optical pulse, thereby preventing the optical pulse from attaining a small temporal width, even if the pulse were transform-limited. SPM-induced spectral narrowing in a 10 meter optical fiber is explicitly shown in Fig. 5. As a function of pulse energy, the minimum attainable pulsewidth at the fiber exit is shown in Fig. 5a. Figure 5b shows the associated spectral content of these pulses, normalized for comparison. For pulse energies below 26 pJ/pulse, the minimum obtainable pulsewidth remains unchanged at $``$175 fs, and the spectral content of these pulses is relatively constant and equal to the spectrum of the pulses before entering the optical fiber, indicating that nonlinear (SPM) effects in the fiber are not significant. For pulse energies above 26 pJ, SPM causes the minimum pulsewidth to grow dramatically from 175 fs, reaching a value of 400 fs at 260 pJ/pulse, or 20 mW of average laser power. The spectral bandwidth of the pulses shrinks correspondingly, from a value of 10 nm for low-power pulses, to just under 3.5 nm for the 260 pJ pulses. Although it stands in contrast to the much more well-known and widely exploited spectral broadening which occurs for positively-chirped or transform-limited optical pulses, SPM-induced spectral narrowing of negatively-chirped optical pulses has been previously studied, and further, might even be exploited as part of a system for fiber delivery of ultrafast nanojoule optical pulses. Regardless, it is clear that the deleterious effects of SPM on the temporal width of the optical pulses (and subsequently on the THz bandwidth and power) requires that the optical pulse energies be kept very low – less than $``$30 pJ/pulse, or 2.3 mW average power from the 76 MHz repetition rate Ti:S laser.

Antenna design and construction

The stringent upper limit on the energy of the optical gating pulses mandate the use of specially-designed THz emitter and receiver antennas for maximum emission efficiency and detection sensitivity when coupled to single-mode optical fibers. Additionally, to minimize the thermal load at liquid helium temperatures ($`<4`$ K), it is desirable to design THz antennas which operate efficiently using as little laser power as possible (in practice, 1-2 mW). For the most part, the THz devices are “standard” photoconductive striplines deposited via photolithography onto semiconductor substrates, with 10-20 micron wide, 1 cm long, titanium-gold lines separated by 50-100 microns. Following the work of Brener et al., the THz emitter also incorporates opposing triangular features at the midpoint of the stripline to concentrate the electric field in a localized region so as to enhance the THz output. The gap between the tips of the triangular features is 5 microns, chosen to match the mode-field diameter of the single-mode fiber. Similarly, the THz stripline receiver incorporates a standard dipole, again with a 5 micron gap. The semiconductor substrates are ErAs/GaAs superlattices grown by molecular-beam epitaxy on GaAs wafers. Here, the ErAs material traps carriers efficiently, resulting in the desired subpicosecond carrier lifetimes necessary for THz photomixing applications. Functionally, this material system is related to low-temperature-grown GaAs (LT-GaAs), but with the added advantages of greater flexibility and control over sample parameters. THz receivers made on ErAs/GaAs superlattices were found to exhibit excellent sensitivity to THz electric fields, on par with that of LT-GaAs and over an order of magnitude more sensitive (per unit power of the optical gating pulse) than implanted silicon-on-sapphire substrates.

Good alignment and bonding of the single-mode optical fiber to the small “sweet spot” of the THz antenna is critical to the construction of a usable THz device, as well over half of the THz signal may be lost if the fiber and antenna become misaligned by as little as 1 micron. Because the devices are used in cryogenic environments and must undergo repeated thermal cycling, proper selection of materials and careful construction are necessary to minimize differential thermal contraction which leads to misalignment (or destruction) of the device. Fiber-coupled THz devices are constructed in the following way: Using an infrared microscope, high-resistivity silicon hyperhemispheres are centered exactly over the antenna dipole on the back side of the wafer, and bonded with a dilute mixture of rubber cement in toluene. Single-mode optical fibers are then epoxied into ceramic ferrules, and polished flush with the face of the ferrule. The ceramic ferrule is then positioned over the THz antenna using an XYZ translation stage with sub-micron actuators (Thorlabs MDT611). The THz emitter is biased (10-20 V), the THz receiver is connected to a fast current amplifier, and optical pulses are coupled into the fibers so that the THz signal may be monitored in real time and used to determine the optimum position of the fiber/ferrule with respect to the antenna. Maximum signal is achieved when the ferrule is nearly in contact with and is positioned exactly over the antenna dipole. Bonding of the ferrule to the antenna is achieved by backing the ferrule away from the antenna and applying an extremely thin layer of clear, degassed Stycast 1266 epoxy to the end of the ferrule, after which the ferrule may again be brought into contact with the antenna and the signal maximized. Once optimized, the epoxy may be left to cure. During alignment, using extremely low-power optical pulses and using viscous (slightly cured) epoxy avoids the formation of bubbles due to local heating from the optical pulses. The resulting bond formed between the ferrule and the antenna is quite robust and rigid, and most importantly, does not suffer any misalignment upon repeated thermal cycling from room temperature to cryogenic temperatures. Use of the ceramic ferrule is important to provide mechanical support for the optical fiber, to match the thermal contraction of the GaAs substrate, and to facilitate the use of as little epoxy as possible. Most epoxies, being polymer-based, exhibit thermal contraction that is much larger than the contraction of the GaAs substrate upon which the THz antenna resides (1.1% total contraction from 300K to 4K for Stycast 1266, as compared to $``$0.1% net contraction for GaAs), so that thick layers of epoxy invariably shatter the substrate upon cooldown. Devices made with stainless steel ferrules occasionally fail upon cooldown, presumably due to the increased mismatch of thermal contraction between stainless steel (0.3% net contraction) and GaAs. Standard UV-curing optical cements performed poorly under cryogenic conditions, and sub-micron alignment was difficult to maintain during the curing process. To make fiber-coupled THz devices for room-temperature use only, any combination of ferrule and epoxy works well – even gluing a bare cleaved fiber directly to the antenna with a drop of Stycast 1266 is quite reliable, if somewhat flimsy. Alternatively, for room-temperature antennas coupled by short lengths of fiber, at least one very nice complete commercial system exists for THz spectroscopy and imaging applications.

Antenna performance

That the fiber-coupled THz antennas perform well at low temperatures and at high magnetic fields is shown in Fig. 6. Here, an emitter and receiver, each coupled by 20 meters of optical fiber, are mounted on the cryogenic probe and loaded in the variable-temperature insert of an 18 T superconducting magnet. The emitter and receiver are driven by 1.5 mW and 2.4 mW of average laser power, respectively. The receiver current is amplified (107 V/A) and sent directly to a digitizing oscilloscope. The amplitude of the measured THz signal varies only slightly upon cooldown from 300K to 1.6K, exhibiting a weak maximum near 100K.

The bandwidth of the THz radiation is unchanged by temperature. THz emitters fabricated on standard semi-insulating GaAs substrates are found to exhibit a much more pronounced temperature dependence, in accord with recent studies by Markelz, where the changes are ascribed to the strongly temperature-dependent mobility of electrons in GaAs. The arrival times of the emitter and receiver optical pulses do vary slightly with temperature, presumably due to unequal lengths of thermally-contracted optical fiber in the cryogenic environment, and this causes a small temporal (phase) shift in the measured THz electric field, as can be seen in Fig. 6a at 90K and 2.2K. Because the THz amplitude and phase do vary slightly with temperature, the use of back-to-back sample and reference scans at each new temperature (and magnetic field) is necessary to extract quantitative conductivity data. Fig. 6b shows the performance of the emitter/receiver pair (now immersed in 1.6K superfluid helium) as a function of magnetic field up to 17 T. The amplitude of the THz electric field is attenuated with field, although with no change in bandwidth. Most likely, the applied field acts to bend the trajectories of the photoexcited electrons away from the axis of the antenna dipoles, causing a reduction in signal. It is not knows whether the field predominantly affects the efficiency of the emitter, or the sensitivity of the receiver.

In the data of Fig. 6, 128 sweeps of the 20 Hz scanning retro-reflector are digitally averaged by the oscilloscope, so as to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. Since a long-term goal of this project is to perform ultrafast coherent THz spectroscopy in very high pulsed magnetic fields (and in particular during the 100 ms flat-top of the 60 Tesla Long-Pulse magnet at the Los Alamos magnet lab), it is necessary that these fiber-coupled devices exhibit sufficient signal-to-noise to facilitate THz spectroscopy on short time scales. Figure 7 shows complete THz traces representing 25 ms (one half-cycle of the retroreflector), 100 ms, and 1600 ms of acquired data. The measured root-mean-square noise on each scan (see insets) is 1.06 mV, 0.41 mV, and 0.12 mV, respectively, for signal-to-noise ratios of approximately 190, 490, and 1700. Thus rather precise spectroscopic THz measurements may be performed in high-field pulsed magnets. Of course, in dc magnets (superconducting to 20 T, or resistive to 45 T), no limitations on the amount of averaging time are imposed, and the accuracy of the measurements may be correspondingly increased.

Data

To demonstrate the utility of the fiber-coupled THz antennas, preliminary results on two material systems are shown in Fig. 8 and 9. Here, the experimental probe is loaded into a cryogenic vacuum can in the bore of a 7 T superconducting solenoid. Figure 8 shows the imaginary part of the measured THz conductivity of a high-temperature superconducting YBCO film (50 nm thick, $`T_c`$85K). At low temperatures (Fig. 8a), the $`1/\omega `$ conductivity from the Drude-like response of superconducting particles with infinite scattering time is clearly observed. With increasing temperature above $`T_c`$ this conductivity falls rapidly, indicating the disappearance of phase coherent superconductivity, in agreement with previous works. Fig. 8b shows that similar behavior is observed as a function of magnetic field for temperatures below $`T_c`$, indicating again that superconductivity is being suppressed, but this time by the application of magnetic field rather than temperature. By using applied magnetic fields to suppress the superconducting state, these studies will permit investigation of the terahertz complex conductivity of the interesting normal state of high-$`T_c`$ superconductors at low temperatures below the zero-field $`T_c`$, where transport (zero frequency) measurements in pulsed fields have yielded a rich behavior.

Lastly, Fig. 9 shows data on a very different system; namely, a very high mobility 2-dimensional electron gas ($`\mu =10^7`$ cm2/V-s) formed at a GaAs/AlGaAs heterojunction. Here, the raw power spectrum of the transmitted THz pulse is shown in the low-field regime where the electron cyclotron energy falls within the THz detection bandwidth. Clear oscillations in the time-domain data (not shown) correspond to the observed cyclotron absorption resonance, which evolves with the expected behavior ($`\mathrm{}\omega _c=eB/m^{}c`$ = 1.73 meV/T = 420 GHz/Tesla). The additional oscillations in the power spectrum are an artifact arising from a multiple reflection of the THz pulse which appears $``$12 ps later in the time domain, and which may be avoided by stacking additional “dummy” wafers of GaAs onto the back of the 2DEG sample. Combined with a carrier density modulation scheme that is synchronized with the scanning retroreflector and digitizer, very sensitive density- and field-dependent studies of the THz conductivity of ultraclean 2D electron systems in the fractional quantum Hall regime may be performed, providing deeper insight into the dynamics and interactions of composite fermions (although generally such studies require millikelvin temperatures and the present apparatus would require adaptation to a dilution refrigerator.)

S.A.C. gratefully acknowledges A. J. Taylor for involvement in this project, and M. Hanson and A. C. Gossard (UCSB) for the ErAs/GaAs material. This work was supported by the NHMFL In-House Research Program.