Effective action for the Regge processes in gravity

Abstract

It is shown, that the effective action for the reggeized graviton interactions can be formulated in terms of the reggeon fields $A^{++}$ and $A^{--}$ and the metric tensor $g_{\mu \nu}$ in such a way, that it is local in the rapidity space and has the property of general covariance. The corresponding effective currents $j^{-}$ and $j^{+}$ satisfy the Hamilton-Jacobi equation for a massless particle moving in the gravitational field. These currents are calculated explicitly for the shock wave-like fields and a variation principle for them is formulated. As an application, we reproduce the effective lagrangian for the multi-regge processes in gravity together with the graviton Regge trajectory in the leading logarithmic approximation with taking into account supersymmetric contributions.