The eikonal approximation and perturbative QCD in the temporal gauge

The extension from the light-cone gauge to the temporal gauge of the Mandelstam-Leibbrandt prescription for non-covariant poles of the gluon propagator is applied to calculate the infrared behaviour of the Bloch-Nordsieck cross-section for annihilation of a massive quark with its antiparticle, to order αs2. The eikonal approximation together with unrestricted momenta of virtual gluons is used to isolate the infrared divergent part of the cross-section. The formerly established absence of quark mass singularities in the cross-section is reproduced provided an integral gets a treatment similar to how some Feynman diagrams involving massless quark propagators are dealt with by the use of dimensional regularization scheme in covariant gauges.