We present the derivation of the two-loop gluon Regge trajectory using Lipatov's high energy effective action and a direct evaluation of Feynman diagrams. Using a gauge invariant regularization of high energy divergences by deforming the light-cone vectors of the effective action, we determine the two-loop self-energy of the reggeized gluon, after computing the master integrals involved using the Mellin-Barnes representations technique. The self-energy is further matched to QCD through a recently proposed subtraction prescription. The Regge trajectory of the gluon is then defined through renormalization of the reggeized gluon propagator with respect to high energy divergences. Our result is in agreement with previous computations in the literature, providing a non-trivial test of the effective action and the proposed subtraction and renormalization framework.
I IntroductionCurrent applications of high energy factorization to QCD phenomenology range from the analysis of perturbative observables, such as dijets widely separated in rapidity [1], over transverse momentum dependent parton distribution functions in the low x region [2], up to the study of phenomena in heavy ion collisions [3]. Their common base is the factorization of QCD scattering amplitudes in the limit of asymptotically large center of mass energy, together with the resummation of large logarithmic contributions using the Balitsky-Fadin-KuraevLipatov (BFKL) equation [4,5]. Recent phenomenological use of the BFKL resummation can be found in the analysis of the combined HERA data on the structure function F 2 and F L [6,7], the study of di-hadron spectra in high multiplicity distributions at the Large Hadron Collider [8] or the production of high p T dijets [9,10,11] , widely separated in rapidity.In the present work we discuss Lipatov's high energy effective action [12] and show that it can serve as a useful tool to reformulate the high energy limit of QCD as an effective field theory of reggeized gluons. While the determination of the high energy limit of tree-level 1 arXiv:1307.2591v1 [hep-ph]