NLO BFKL at Work: the Electroproduction of Two Light Vector Mesons

The forward electroproduction of two light vector mesons is the first example of a collision process between strongly interacting colorless particles for which the amplitude can be written completely within perturbative QCD in the Regge limit with next-to-leading accuracy. This amplitude can be written as a convolution of two impact factors for the virtual photon to light vector meson transition with the BFKL Green's function. In this lecture we first describe how the relevant impact factor is calculated, then we perform the convolution with the BFKL Green's function and illustrate the numerical procedure to obtain a well-behaved amplitude. (author)