English

Generalized transverse momentum distributions at small-$x$

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-03-09 v1

Abstract

We compute the complete set of the leading-twist gluon and sea-quark generalized transverse momentum distributions (GTMDs) in the small-xx, or eikonal, approximation at vanishing skewness ξ=0\xi = 0. All the gluon GTMDs become expressed in terms of the basic gluon dipole operator featuring also proton helicity-flips. Consequently, we establish universal relations between otherwise distinct GTMDs that hold in the small-xx limit. The obtained results are systematically projected onto the transverse momentum dependent distributions (TMD) and the generalized parton distribution (GPD) cases, recovering known results where available. In case of sea-quarks all the GTMDs are given in terms of the gluon dipole convoluted with a hard kernel. We generalize the unpolarized sea-quark GTMD to non-zero momentum transfers and find new results for the proton helicity-flip distributions. We pay special attention to their perturbative, high transverse momentum, tails to confirm that it becomes governed by the small-xx gluon GPDs. The obtained results provide guidance to the phenomenological modeling of the GTMDs but also allow for their explicit computations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.06092,
  title  = {Generalized transverse momentum distributions at small-$x$},
  author = {Sanjin Benić and Yoshikazu Hagiwara and Boris Šarić and Eric Andreas Vivoda},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.06092},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

24 pages with references, 0 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:06:30.197Z