The $\gamma^* \gamma^*$ total cross section in NLA BFKL

Abstract

We study the $\gamma^* \gamma^*$ total cross section in the NLA BFKL approach. We have extracted the NLO corrections to the photon impact factor from two recent papers of Balitsky and Chirilli and Chirilli and Kovchegov and used them to build several representations of the total cross section, equivalent within the NLA. We have combined these different representations with two among the most common methods for the optimization of a perturbative series, namely PMS and BLM, and compared their behavior with the energy with the only available experimental data, those from the LEP2 collider.