Gluon Regge trajectory at two loops from Lipatovʼs high energy effective action

We present the derivation of the two-loop gluon Regge trajectory using Lipatovʼs high energy effective action and a direct evaluation of Feynman diagrams. Using a gauge invariant regularization of high energy divergences by deforming the light-cone vectors of the effective action, we determine the two-loop self-energy of the reggeized gluon, after computing the master integrals involved using the Mellin–Barnes representations technique. The self-energy is further matched to QCD through a recently proposed subtraction prescription. The Regge trajectory of the gluon is then defined through renormalization of the reggeized gluon propagator with respect to high energy divergences. Our result is in agreement with previous computations in the literature, providing a non-trivial test of the effective action and the proposed subtraction and renormalization framework.