English

Analytic Solution for the Helicity Evolution Equations at Small $x$ and Large $N_c\&N_f$

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2025-08-04 v1 Nuclear Theory

Abstract

We construct an exact analytic solution of the revised small-xx helicity evolution equations, where the contributions of the quark-to-gluon and gluon-to-quark transition operators were newly included. These evolution equations are written in the large-Nc&NfN_c\&N_f limit and are double-logarithmic, resumming powers of αsln2(1/x)\alpha_s\ln^2(1/x). Here NcN_c and NfN_f are the numbers of quark colors and flavors, while αs\alpha_s is the strong coupling constant and xx is the Bjorken-xx variable. Using our solution, we obtain analytic expressions for the flavor singlet quark and gluon helicity parton distribution functions (PDFs) and for the g1g_1 structure function as double-inverse Laplace transforms. We also extract analytic expressions for the four DGLAP polarized anomalous dimensions Δγqq,ΔγqG,ΔγGq\Delta \gamma_{qq}, \Delta \gamma_{qG}, \Delta \gamma_{Gq}, and ΔγGG\Delta \gamma_{GG}: these expressions resum powers of αs/ω2\alpha_s/\omega^2 to all orders at large-Nc&NfN_c\&N_f (with ω\omega the Mellin moment variable). We extract the leading small-xx growth of the helicity distributions, \begin{align} \Delta\Sigma(x,Q^2) \sim \Delta G(x,Q^2)\sim g_1(x,Q^2) \sim \left(\frac{1}{x}\right)^{\alpha_h}, \end{align} where the intercept αh\alpha_h satisfies an algebraic equation. We determine αh\alpha_h numerically for various values of NcN_c and NfN_f. We further obtain the explicit asymptotic expressions for the helicity distributions, which yield numerical values for the ratio of the gluon helicity PDF to the flavor singlet quark helicity PDF in the small-xx asymptotic limit (for different Nf/NcN_f/N_c). We find that all our predictions for polarized DGLAP anomalous dimensions are fully consistent with the existing finite-order calculations. Similar to the large-NcN_c case, our intercept αh\alpha_h exhibits a very slight disagreement with the predictions made within the infrared evolution equations framework.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.00195,
  title  = {Analytic Solution for the Helicity Evolution Equations at Small $x$ and Large $N_c\&N_f$},
  author = {Jeremy Borden and Yuri V. Kovchegov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.00195},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

38 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:28:38.828Z