English

Fock Space Distributions, Structure Functions, Higher Twists and Small x

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2009-10-31 v2 Nuclear Theory

Abstract

We compute quark structure functions and the intrinsic Fock space distribution of sea quarks in a hadron wavefunction at small x. The computation is performed in an effective theory at small x where the gluon field is treated classically. At Q2Q^2 large compared to an intrinsic scale associated with the density of gluons μ2\mu^2, large compared to the QCD scale ΛQCD2\Lambda^2_{QCD}, and large compared to the quark mass squared M2M^2, the Fock space distribution of quarks is identical to the distribution function measured in deep inelastic scattering. For Q2M2Q^2 \le M^2 but Q2>>μ2Q^2 >> \mu^2, the quark distribution is computed in terms of the gluon distribution function and explicit expressions are obtained. For Q2μ2Q^2 \le \mu^2 but Q2>>ΛQCD2Q^2 >> \Lambda_{QCD}^2 we obtain formal expressions for the quark distribution functions in terms of the glue. An evaluation of these requires a renormalization group analysis of the gluon distribution function in the regime of high parton density. For light quarks at high Q2Q^2, the DGLAP flavor singlet evolution equations for the parton distributions are recovered. Explicit expressions are given for heavy quark structure functions at small x.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-ph/9809427,
  title  = {Fock Space Distributions, Structure Functions, Higher Twists and Small x},
  author = {Larry McLerran and Raju Venugopalan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/9809427},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

52 pages Latex, Revised with minor typos corrected

R2 v1 2026-07-22T14:46:19.464Z