Two-loop anomalous dimension in light-cone gauge with Mandelstam-Leibbrandt prescription Original Research Article

All the next-to-leading order results for Altarelli-Parisi splitting functions have been obtained in the literature either by using the operator product expansion method or by making use of the Curci-Furmanski-Petronzio (CFP) formalism in conjunction with light-like axial gauge, principal value (PV) prescription and dimensional regularization. In this paper we present the calculation of some non-singlet two-loop anomalous dimensions with the CFP formalism using light-cone axial gauge with Mandelstam-Leibbrandt (ML) prescription. We make a detailed comparison between the intermediate results given by the PV versus the ML method. We point out that the ML method is completely consistent and avoids the “phenomenological rules” used in the case of PV regularization.