Deep Inelastic Scattering in the Dipole Picture at Next-to-Leading Order

This thesis studies gluon saturation in hadronic matter at high energy by calculating next-to-leading order (NLO) corrections to inclusive and diffractive deep inelastic scattering cross sections in the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) effective field theory. We demonstrate that the large soft gluon logarithm is correctly factorized into the Balitsky-Kovchegov (BK) renormalization group equation by accurately connecting the NLO scattering kinematics to the rapidity scale of the dipole amplitude in the scattering. This brings the perturbative expansion under control and enables us to do precision comparisons between theory and data. We fit the initial condition of the BK evolution equation to HE…

One-loop corrections to light cone wave functions: the dipole picture DIS cross section

We develop methods needed to perform loop calculations in light cone perturbation theory using a helicity basis, refining the method introduced in our earlier work. In particular this includes implementing a consistent way to contract the four-dimensional tensor structures from the helicity vectors with d-dimensional tensors arising from loop integrals, in a way that can be fully automatized. We demonstrate this explicitly by calculating the one-loop correction to the virtual photon to quark-antiquark dipole light cone wave function. This allows us to calculate the deep inelastic scattering cross section in the dipole formalism to next-to-leading order accuracy. Our results, obtained using …

Dipole model at Next-to-Leading Order meets HERA data

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 picture 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 cros…

Deep inelastic scattering in the dipole picture at next-to-leading order

We study quantitatively the importance of the recently derived NLO corrections to the DIS structure functions at small x in the dipole formalism. We show that these corrections can be significant and depend on the factorization scheme used to resum large logarithms of energy into renormalization group evolution with the BK equation. This feature is similar to what has recently been observed for single inclusive forward hadron production. Using a factorization scheme consistent with the one recently proposed for the single inclusive cross section, we show that it is possible to obtain meaningful results for the DIS cross sections.

Diffractive deep inelastic scattering at NLO in the dipole picture: The qq¯g contribution

Diffractive deep inelastic scattering at NLO in the dipole picture: The qq¯g contribution

We calculate the contribution from the qq¯g state production to the diffractive cross sections in deep inelastic scattering at high energy. The obtained cross section is finite by itself and a part of the full next-to-leading order result for the diffractive structure functions. We perform the calculation in exact kinematics in the eikonal limit, and show that the previously known high-Q2 and large MX2 results for the structure functions can be extracted from our results in the appropriate limits. We furthermore discuss the steps required to obtain the full next-to-leading order results for the structure functions.