We show that a large anomalous contribution to the axial charge of the proton due to nonperturbative instantonlike gluonic field configurations implies high-energy spin effects in p-p elastic scattering. This is the same mechanism which is responsible for anomalous baryon number violation at high energy in the standard model. We compute the proton polarization due to these effects and we show that it is proportional to the center-of-mass scattering angle with a universal (energy independent) slope of order unity.

• Received 11 December 1992

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.71.223