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Orbital Angular Momentum at Small $x$

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2019-05-01 v1 Nuclear Experiment Nuclear Theory

Abstract

We determine the small Bjorken xx asymptotics of the quark and gluon orbital angular momentum (OAM) distributions in the proton in the double-logarithmic approximation (DLA), which resums powers of αsln2(1/x)\alpha_s \ln^2 (1/x) with αs\alpha_s the strong coupling constant. Starting with the operator definitions for the quark and gluon OAM, we simplify them at small xx, relating them, respectively, to the polarized dipole amplitudes for the quark and gluon helicities defined in our earlier works. Using the small-xx evolution equations derived for these polarized dipole amplitudes earlier we arrive at the following small-xx asymptotics of the quark and gluon OAM distributions in the large-NcN_c limit: \begin{align} L_{q + \bar{q}} (x, Q^2) = - \Delta \Sigma (x, Q^2) \sim \left(\frac{1}{x}\right)^{\frac{4}{\sqrt{3}} \, \sqrt{\frac{\alpha_s \, N_c}{2 \pi}} }, \ \ \ \ \ L_G (x, Q^2) \sim \Delta G (x, Q^2) \sim \left(\frac{1}{x}\right)^{\frac{13}{4 \sqrt{3}} \, \sqrt{\frac{\alpha_s \, N_c}{2 \pi}}} . \end{align}

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1901.07453,
  title  = {Orbital Angular Momentum at Small $x$},
  author = {Yuri V. Kovchegov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.07453},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

27 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:18:46.206Z