Infrared safety of impact factors for colourless particle interactions

Abstract

We demonstrate, to next-to-leading order accuracy, the cancellation of the infrared singularities in the impact factors which arise in the QCD description of high energy processes A + B -> A' + B' of colourless particles. We study the example where A is a virtual photon in detail, but show that the result is true in general.

Comments: 31 pages latex including 10 figures