The Pomeron loop as a perturbative correction to single Pomeron exchange revisited

Abstract

Pomeron loops are known to arise naturally as building blocks of high energy scattering amplitudes as soon as one starts to consider corrections to single Pomeron exchange, i.e. to high energy resummation based on the Balitsky-Fadin-Kuraev-Lipatov evolution equation. While some authors argue that Pomeron loops provide only very small corrections, a 2013 study found that the complete QCD Pomeron loop provides a large correction, which can exceed the single Pomeron contribution already at LHC energies. In this paper we carefully review the derivation of the single Pomeron loop and evaluate the resulting expression numerically, making use of a representation of the triple Pomeron vertex by Korchemsky. While we do not confirm the findings of the 2013 study, we find that the Pomeron loop can provide a 24%-39% correction at lowest currently accessible values of $x$ and hard scales at the non-perturbative boundary.