Aspects of high energy scattering in Abelian and non Abelian Gauge theories

Abstract

This thesis reviews certain aspects of high energy scattering in abelian and non abelian gauge theories. This subject has been extensively studied over the last few decades, using perturbative techniques. Recently it has been pointed out that by a scaling argument, one can decouple certain degrees of freedom from the theory so that the resulting effective theory is simpler and of lower dimensions, and hopefully reproduces all known physics in this kinematic regime. The standard results as well as the scaling argument in the context of QED and QCD are reviewed, but it is shown that whereas in QED the scaling argument reproduces the standard results, there is as yet no sign of the well known reggeization of the gluon propagator in QCD.