COLOR EXCHANGE IN NEAR-FORWARD HARD ELASTIC-SCATTERING

We study the large-t small-angle behavior of quark-quark elastic scatt ering. We employ a factorization procedure previously developed for fi xed-angle scattering, which depends on the color structure of the fact orized hard subprocess. We find an evolution in t that (in leading log arithmic approximation) becomes diagonal in a singlet-octet basis in t he t-channel as s --> infinity. Octet exchange in the hard scattering is associated with the familiar ''reggeized'', s(alphag(t)) behavior, which arises from s-dependence in Sudakov suppression. In contrast, Su dakov suppression for t-channel singlet exchange in the hard scatterin g is s-independent. In general, these contributions are mixed by soft corrections, which, however, cancel in many experimental amplitudes an d cross sections.