RESUMMATION OF LARGE INFRARED CORRECTIONS USING WILSON LOOPS

We discuss a method to resum systematically large soft gluon corrections to hard hadronic cross sections such as the structure function F(x, Q2) for x --> 1. We show that all singularities as x --> 1 are factorized into a Wilson loop expectation value which is a function of the ratio of the infrared scale (1 - x)Q2 and the short distance cutoff mu2 introduced by the factorization procedure. Thus we obtain the x --> 1 behavior by studying the appropriate renormalization group equation which controls the mu-dependence of Wilson loops. Next-to-leading corrections are calculated. The method can be generalized to other distributions.