Eikonal Expansion for Classical Gluon Fields: from Weak to Strong

Abstract

We develop a formal procedure of eikonal expansion for classical fields in gluodynamics. We show that in the weak field limit the expansion is straightforward and determines the eikonal components of vector potentials in terms of eikonal components of color currents via classical equations motion. We demonstrate that the recently proposed Born-Oppenheimer high energy evolution yields the ground state wave function interpretable in terms of the classical fields. The relevant classical field is indeed consistent with the eikonal expansion, and contains the leading eikonal and subeikonal components. For strong fields we find that the naive eikonal expansion is inconsistent, as nonlilearities in equations of motion lead to mixing of eikonal orders. Thus the effect of subeikonal components on the leading eikonal component is not suppressed by the eikonality parameter. We show that this problem can be rectified by classically "integrating out" high longitudional momentum components of gluon fields. This leads to a classical action for the low momentum components with small self interaction, but strongly renorlamized currents, which contain contribution due to high momentum modes.