QCD Analysis of the Polarized Deep-Inelastic World Data

The results of a recent next-to-leading order QCD analysis of the world data on polarized deep inelastic scattering are reported. New parameterizations are derived for the quark and gluon distributions, accounting for the massive Wilson coefficient for the charm quarks, and the value of $\alpha_s(M_z^2)$ is determined with correlated errors. We obtain $\alpha_s^{\rm NLO}(M_Z^2)= 0.1132 {array}{l} + 0.0056 -0.0095 {array}$. Limits on potential higher twist contributions to the structure function $g_1(x,Q^2)$ are derived. We also compare to the results obtained by other groups.