LIGHT-CONE GAUGE AND THE CALCULATION OF THE 2-LOOP SPLITTING FUNCTIONS - ART. NO. 094020

We present calculations of next-to-leading order QCD splitting functio ns, employing the light-cone gauge method of Curci, Furmanski, and Pet ronzio (CFP). In contrast with the ''principal-value'' prescription us ed in the original CFP paper for dealing with the poles of the light-c one gauge gluon propagator, we adopt the Mandelstam-Leibbrandt prescri ption which is known to have a solid field-theoretical foundation. We find that indeed the calculation using this prescription is conceptual ly clear and avoids the somewhat dubious manipulations of the spurious poles required when the principal-value method is applied. We reprodu ce the well-known results for the flavor nonsinglet splitting function and the N-C(2) part of the gluon-to-gluon singlet splitting function, which are the most complicated ones, and which provide an exhaustive test of the ML prescription. We also discuss in some detail the x = 1 end point contributions to the splitting functions. [S0556-2821(98)032 19-6]