The analytic structure and the transcendental weight of the BFKL ladder at NLL accuracy

We study some analytic properties of the BFKL ladder at next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy (NLLA). We use a procedure by Chirilli and Kovchegov to construct the NLO eigenfunctions, and we show that the BFKL ladder can be evaluated order by order in the coupling in terms of certain generalised single-valued multiple polylogarithms recently introduced by Schnetz. We develop techniques to evaluate the BFKL ladder at any loop order, and we present explicit results up to five loops. Using the freedom in defining the matter content of the NLO BFKL eigenvalue, we obtain conditions for the BFKL ladder in momentum space at NLLA to have maximal transcendental weight. We observe that, unlike in moment space, the result in momentum space in N = 4 SYM is not identical to the maximal weight part of QCD, and moreover that there is no gauge theory with this property. We classify the theories for which the BFKL ladder at NLLA has maximal weight in terms of their field content, and we find that these theories are highly constrained: there are precisely four classes of theories with this property involving only fundamental and adjoint matter, all of which have a vanishing one-loop beta function and a matter content that fits into supersymmetric multiplets. Our findings indicate that theories which have maximal weight are highly constrained and point to the possibility that there is a connection between maximal transcendental weight and superconformal symmetry.