Computation of the relation between the bare lattice coupling and the MSbar coupling in SU(N) gauge theories to two loops

The perturbation expansion of the MSbar coupling in the SU(N) gauge theory in powers of the bare lattice coupling is extended to two-loop order. A discussion of our results has already been published elsewhere. We here describe the calculation in some detail. It relies on the background field technique and a recently introduced coordinate space method to evaluate lattice Feynman integrals.