Reggeized gluons with a running coupling constant

Abstract

The equation for two reggeized gluons in the vacuum channel is generalized to take into account the running QCD coupling constant on the basis of the bootstrap condition for gluon reggeization. Both the gluon trajectory as a function of momentum and the interaction as a function of distance grow like log log in the ultraviolet. The resulting equation depends on the confinement region. With a simple parametrization of its influence by an effective gluon mass the pomeron intercept turns out to be much smaller than for a fixed coupling constant (the BFKL pomeron).