English

Small-$x$ asymptotics of the quark helicity distribution

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2017-02-08 v2 High Energy Physics - Experiment

Abstract

We construct a numerical solution of the small-xx evolution equations recently derived in \cite{Kovchegov:2015pbl} for the (anti)quark helicity TMDs and PDFs as well as the g1g_1 structure function. We focus on the case of large NcN_c where one finds a closed set of equations. Employing the extracted intercept, we are able to predict directly from theory the behavior of the helicity PDFs at small xx, which should have important phenomenological consequences. We also give an estimate of how much of the proton's spin may be at small xx and what impact this has on the so-called "spin crisis."

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1610.06188,
  title  = {Small-$x$ asymptotics of the quark helicity distribution},
  author = {Yuri V. Kovchegov and Daniel Pitonyak and Matthew D. Sievert},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.06188},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

5 pages, 4 figures; minor changes, to appear in PRL