Direct calculations of the odderon intercept in perturbative QCD

Abstract The odderon intercept is calculated directly, from its expression via an average energy of the odderon Hamiltonian, using both trial wave functions in the variational approach and the wave function recently constructed by Janik and Wosiek. The results confirm their reported value for the energy. Variational calculations give energies some 30% higher. However, they also predict the odderon intercept to be quite close to unity. In fact, for realistic values of α s , the intercept calculated variationally is at most 2% lower than the exact one: 0.94 instead of 0.96. It is also found that the solution for q 3 = 0 does not belong to the odderon spectrum. The diffusion parameter is found to be of the order 0.6.