Traveling waves and impact-parameter correlations

It is usually assumed that the high-energy evolution of partons in QCD remains local in coordinate space. In particular, fixed impact-parameter scattering is thought to be in the universality class of one-dimensional reaction-diffusion processes as if the evolutions at different points in the transverse plane became uncorrelated through rapidity evolution. We check this assumption by numerically comparing a toy model with QCD-like impact-parameter dependence to its exact counterpart with uniform evolution in impact-parameter space. We find quantitative differences, but which seem to amount to a mere rescaling of the strong coupling constant. Since the rescaling factor does not show any strong αs dependence, we conclude that locality is well verified, up to subleading terms at small αs.