A colorful look at fast-flying particles

The strong nuclear force is one of the four fundamental forces of nature, along with the electromagnetic, gravitational and weak nuclear forces. The branch of particle physics that deals with the strong nuclear force is called quantum chromodynamics (QCD). The term “chromo” refers to the charge in the theory, which is called color (not related to the everyday meaning of the word in terms of visible light). It is important to understand more about QCD, since it gives us a better understanding of nature as a whole and of the universe we occupy. This thesis develops new equations that describe how quantities measured in experiments depend on energy. One such equation describes the energy dependence of the odderon, a particle that has been made famous in international news recently due to its observation at CERN in late 2020. We also use a new method to calculate evolution equations without making the usual assumption that QCD has infinitely many colors, instead of the three colors it has in reality.