Generalized transverse momentum distributions at small-$x$
Abstract
We compute the complete set of the leading-twist gluon and sea-quark generalized transverse momentum distributions (GTMDs) in the small-, or eikonal, approximation at vanishing skewness . 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- 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- gluon GPDs. The obtained results provide guidance to the phenomenological modeling of the GTMDs but also allow for their explicit computations.
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