Light-cone gauge and the calculation of the two-loop splitting functions

We present calculations of next-to-leading order QCD splitting functions, employing the light-cone gauge method of Curci, Furmanski, and Petronzio ~CFP!. In contrast with the ‘‘principal-value’’ prescription used in the original CFP paper for dealing with the poles of the light-cone gauge gluon propagator, we adopt the Mandelstam-Leibbrandt prescription which is known to have a solid field-theoretical foundation. We find that indeed the calculation using this prescription is conceptually clear and avoids the somewhat dubious manipulations of the spurious poles required when the principal-value method is applied. We reproduce the wellknown results for the flavor nonsinglet splitting function and the NC 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 x51 end point contributions to the splitting functions. @S0556-2821~98!03219-6#