The Next-to-Leading BFKL Pomeron with Optimal Renormalization

The next-to-leading order (NLO) corrections to the BFKL equation in the BLM optimal scale setting are briefly discussed. A striking feature of the BLM approach is rather weak Q^2-dependence of the Pomeron intercept, which might indicate an approximate conformal symmetry of the equation. An application of the NLO BFKL resummation for the virtual gamma-gamma total cross section shows a good agreement with recent L3 data at the CERN LEP2.