On possible implications of gluon number fluctuations in DIS data

TL;DR

This paper investigates how gluon number fluctuations influence deep inelastic scattering data, showing that including these fluctuations improves data description and aligns parameter values with simulations, suggesting potential geometric scaling violations.

Contribution

It demonstrates that gluon number fluctuations can explain observed scaling violations in DIS data and aligns parameter estimates with toy model simulations.

Findings

Inclusion of gluon fluctuations improves DIS data fit.

Parameter values match those from fluctuation-inclusive models.

Evidence suggests geometric scaling violations in DIS data.

Abstract

We study the effect of gluon number fluctuations (Pomeron loops) on deep inelastic scattering (DIS) in the fixed coupling case. We find that the description of the DIS data is improved once gluon number fluctuations are included. Also the values of the parameters, like the saturation exponent and the diffussion coefficient, turn out reasonable and agree with values obtained from numerical simulations of toy models which take into account fluctuations. This outcome seems to indicate the evidence of geometric scaling violations, and a possible implication of gluon number fluctuations, in the DIS data. However, we cannot exclude the possibility that the scaling violations may also come from the diffusion part of the solution to the BK-equation, instead of gluon number fluctuations.