Probing the high-energy limit of QCD

by Jeppe Andersen (University of Cambridge)

Friday 28 Oct 2005, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Auditorium (CERN)

The high energy limit of scattering processes in QCD is, at least on the purely theoretical level, described by the BFKL equation. The BFKL dynamics can be used for the prediction of many multi-jet processes relevant for 'background studies' at the LHC. At the same time, the study of these events will probe our understanding of QCD (and field theory in general) in a region less well understood than the super-perturbative region with one very hard scale.  However, most phenomenological studies of BFKL fail miserably when confronted with data. In this talk I will critically review the application of leading log (LL) BFKL in phenomenology, and similarly critically examine the application of LL eigenfunctions in the study of the NLL BFKL kernel. We then introduce a recently proposed iterative solution of the NLL BFKL equation and discuss the insights it gives to the evolution at high energies.