The quasi-abelian limit

A new, non-perturbative, eikonal method called the ''quasi abelian limit'' (QAL) is suggested for high energy quark (nucleon) scattering involving the exchange of all possible, non-interacting, non-abelian gluons (mesons). With this method, those functional integrals defining, e.g., the exchange of color coordinates in quark-quark scattering, are replaced by a finite number of quadratures over a subset of their coordinates. Mathematically, this procedure is not rigourous, because an unjustified interchange of limits has been performed; physically, it corresponds to the observation that the non-perturbative sum over all color-moment fluctuations can vanish at arbitrarily high energies. The QAL generates a result in agreement with a corrected, ''contiguity'' calculation, when the latter is summed over all perturbative orders. (orig.)