Detailed QCD analysis of the photon structure function
- 1 October 1984
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Physical Society (APS) in Physical Review D
- Vol. 30 (7), 1447-1460
- https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.30.1447
Abstract
The effects of nonasymptotic terms in the photon structure function predicted by QCD are studied directly in space in leading and subleading order. The full (regular) solution including the hadronic nonasymptotic (-dependent input) terms is shown to be free from the unphysical singularities of the asymptotic solution and is furthermore positive definite for suitable chosen boundary conditions (at ) and in the physically relevant region ( GeV). The implications of the nonasymptotic solution and of their perturbatively uncalculable boundary conditions for the determination of and for the predictive power of purely perturbative QCD in the determination of are critically analyzed. Furthermore, taking carefully into account charm production, detailed predictions are given for present and future (unfolded) data. Similarly to the case of deepinelastic lepton-nucleon scattering, the (nonperturbative) photonic input parton distributions at are different for leading- and higher-order calculations. This implies that the differences between leading- and higher-order predictions for are too small to be distinguished by present experiments. The only clean test of QCD, independent of the hadronic input, can be achieved by observing an increase of with for fixed values of .
Keywords
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