The system of four reggeized gluons and the three-pomeron vertex in the high colour limit

Abstract

The amplitude for 4 interacting reggeized gluons is studied in the high-colour limit. The leading order amplitude is explicitly shown to reduce to a pair of reggeons, i.e to a single BFKL pomeron. The next-to-leading order diffractive amplitude is found to split into a double pomeron exchange and triple pomeron contribution. The obtained three-pomeron vertex is different from the originally proposed in [2].