In recent years, the study of strong interaction physics within the framework of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) has largely been restricted to processes which involve a single hard scale (of the order of the centre-of-mass energy). There is a whole wealth of strong interaction physics which is ignored in such a study, including the connection between QCD and Regge theory, which was successfully used to describe certain aspects of the strong interactions before the advent of QCD.

The connection between QCD and Regge theory has attracted much attention in the theoretical community for many years now. Indeed the BFKL equation, which describes what we shall refer to as the perturbative Pomeron, has been known for nearly twenty years. Only recently with the arrival of the HERA and Tevatron colliders has it been possible to perform experiments in the kinematic regime relevant to the perturbative Pomeron. Structure functions at low values of Bjorken x and the observation of rapidity gaps are examples of phenomena which can be used to test the perturbative Pomeron.

The work of those many authors who have contributed to the understanding of the Pomeron in QCD is indeed very formidable. However, to our knowledge, no single self-contained compendium of such work exists. Furthermore many of the papers which have been published on this subject have not been written in a particularly pedagogical style and are therefore not easily understood by a pedestrian reader who wishes learn about the perturbative Pomeron.