NLO BFKL at work: the electroproduction of two light vector mesons

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how to compute the amplitude for the electroproduction of two light vector mesons using next-to-leading order BFKL in perturbative QCD, providing a detailed method for calculation.

Contribution

It presents a complete perturbative QCD framework for calculating the amplitude of light vector meson electroproduction at NLO BFKL accuracy, including impact factor computation and convolution with the Green's function.

Findings

First complete NLO BFKL calculation for this process

Numerical procedure for a well-behaved amplitude

Framework applicable to similar high-energy scattering processes

Abstract

The forward electroproduction of two light vector mesons is the first example of a collision process between strongly interacting colorless particles for which the amplitude can be written completely within perturbative QCD in the Regge limit with next-to-leading accuracy. This amplitude can be written as a convolution of two impact factors for the virtual photon to light vector meson transition with the BFKL Green's function. In this lecture we first describe how the relevant impact factor is calculated, then we perform the convolution with the BFKL Green's function and illustrate the numerical procedure to obtain a well-behaved amplitude.