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

Abstract

The amplitude for the forward electroproduction of two light vector mesons can be written completely within perturbative QCD in the Regge limit with next-to-leading accuracy, thus providing the first example of a physical application of the BFKL approach at the next-to-leading order. Recently, a numerical determination of the amplitude has been obtained in the case of equal photon virtualities, by using a definite representation for the amplitude and a definite optimization method for the perturbative series. Here, we study the main systematic effects in the previous determination, by considering a different representation of the amplitude and different optimization methods of the perturbative series. Moreover, we compare our result for the differential cross section at the minimum $|t|$ with a different approach, based on collinear kernel improvement.