No Arabic abstract
Exclusive emissions of vector mesons in forward directions of rapidity offer us a faultless chance to probe the proton structure at small-$x$. A high-energy factorization formula is established within BFKL, given as the convolution of an impact factor depicting the forward-meson emission and of an unintegrated gluon distribution (UGD) driving the gluon evolution at small-$x$. As a nonperturbative quantity, the UGD is not well known and several models for it exist. We present recent progresses on the study of the exclusive forward $rho$-meson leptoproduction at HERA and EIC energies, showing how osbervables sensitive to different polarization states of the $rho$-particle act as discriminators for the existing UGD models.
Sufficiently inclusive processes, like the deep inelastic scattering (DIS), are described in terms of scale-dependent parton distributions, which correspond to the density of partons with a given longitudinal momentum fraction, integrated over the parton transverse momentum. For less inclusive processes, one needs to consider densities unintegrated over the transverse momentum. This work focuses on the unintegrated gluon distribution (UGD), describing the probability that a gluon can be emitted by a colliding proton, with definite longitudinal fraction and transverse momentum. Through the leptoproduction of the $rho$-meson at HERA, existent models for the UGD will be investigated and compared with experimental data.
We present detailed numerical analysis of the unintegrated double gluon distribution which includes the dependence on the transverse momenta of partons. The unintegrated double gluon distribution was obtained following the Kimber-Martin-Ryskin method as a convolution of the perturbative gluon splitting function with the collinear integrated double gluon distribution and the Sudakov form factors. We analyze the dependence on the transverse momenta, longitudinal momentum fractions and hard scales. We find that the unintegrated gluon distribution factorizes into a product of two single unintegrated gluon distributions in the region of small values of $x$, provided the splitting contribution is included and the momentum sum rule is satisfied.
We present a non-perturbative QCD calculation of high-energy diffractive photo- and leptoproduction of vector mesons $rho$, $rho$ and $rho$ on a nucleon. The initial photon splits up in a $qbar{q}$-dipole and transforms into a vector meson by scattering on the quark-diquark nucleon. The dipole-dipole scattering amplitude is provided by the non-perturbative model of the stochastic QCD vacuum, the wave functions result from considerations on the light-cone. We assume the physical $rho$- and $rho$-states to be mixed states of an active 2S-excitation and a rest whose coupling to the photon is suppressed. We obtain good agreement with the experimental data and get an understanding of the markedly different spectrum in the $pi^+pi^-$-invariant mass for photoproduction and $e^+e^-$-annihilation.
We provide a semi-classical description of the inclusive gluon induced Deep Inelastic Scattering cross section in a way that accounts for the leading powers in both the Regge and Bjorken limits. Our approach thus allows a systematic matching of small and moderate $x_{rm Bj}$ regimes of gluon proton structure functions. We find a new unintegrated gluon distribution with an explicit dependence on the longitudinal momentum fraction $x$ which entirely spans both the dipole operator and the gluonic Parton Distribution Function. Computing this gauge invariant gluon operator on the lattice could allow to probe the energy dependence of the saturation scale from first principles.
We derive analytical results for unintegrated color dipole gluon distribution function at small transverse momentum. By Fourier transforming the $S$-matrix for large dipoles we derive the results in the form of a series of Bells polynomials. Interestingly, when resumming the series in leading log accuracy, the results showing up striking similarity with the Sudakov form factor with role play of coupling is being done by a constant that stems from the saddle point condition along the saturation line.