We discuss the recent proposal in hep-th/0611312 where it was shown that the critical anomalous dimension associated to the onset of non-linear effects in the high energy limit of QCD coincides with the critical exponent governing the radius of the b
lack hole formed in the spherically symmetric collapse of a massless scalar field. We argue that a new essential ingredient in this mapping between gauge theory and gravity is continuous self-similarity, not present in the scalar field case but in the spherical collapse of a perfect fluid with barotropic equation of state. We identify this property with geometric scaling, present in DIS data at small values of Bjorken x. We also show that the Choptuik exponent in dimension five tends to the QCD critical value in the traceless limit of the energy momentum tensor.
We discuss the inclusive production of jets in the central region of rapidity in the context of k_T-factorization at next-to-leading order (NLO). Calculations are performed in the Regge limit making use of the NLO BFKL results. We introduce a jet con
e definition and carry out a proper phase--space separation into multi-Regge and quasi-multi-Regge kinematic regions. We discuss two situations: scattering of highly virtual photons, which requires a symmetric energy scale to separate impact factors from the gluon Greens function, and hadron-hadron collisions, where a non-symmetric scale choice is needed.
