Deep inelastic scattering (DIS) total cross section data at small-x as measured by the HERA experiments is well described by Balitsky-Kovchegov (BK) evolution in the leading order dipole picture. Recently the full Next-to-Leading Order (NLO) dipole p
icture total cross sections have become available for DIS, and a working factorization scheme has been devised which subtracts the soft gluon divergence present at NLO. We report our recently published work in which we make the first comparisons of the NLO DIS total cross sections to HERA data. The non-perturbative initial condition to BK evolution is fixed by fitting the HERA reduced cross section data. As the NLO results for the DIS total cross section are currently available only in the massless quark limit, we also fit a light-quark-only cross section constructed with a parametrization of published total and heavy quark data. We find an excellent description of the HERA data. Since the full NLO BK equation is computationally expensive, we use a number of beyond LO prescriptions for the evolution that include most important higher order corrections enhanced by large transverse logarithms, including the recent version of the equation formulated in terms of the target momentum fraction.
We perform the first dipole picture fit to HERA inclusive cross section data using the full next-to-leading order (NLO) impact factor combined with an improved Balitsky-Kovchegov evolution including the dominant effects beyond leading logarithmic acc
uracy at low $x$. We find that three different formulations of the evolution equation that have been proposed in the recent literature result in a very similar description of HERA data, and robust predictions for future deep inelastic scattering experiments. We find evidence pointing towards a significant nonperturbative contribution to the structure function for light quarks, which stresses the need to extend the NLO impact factor calculation to massive quarks.
