The dipole picture in DIS: saturation and heavy quarks

TL;DR

This paper models the proton structure function using the dipole picture, incorporating saturation effects and heavy quark contributions, successfully describing various experimental data in deep inelastic scattering.

Contribution

It introduces a novel parametrisation of the dipole amplitude that maintains a stable saturation scale even with heavy quarks, improving upon previous models.

Findings

Saturation scale remains stable with heavy quarks

Model reproduces diffractive and vector meson production data

Dipole amplitude effectively describes small-x QCD phenomena

Abstract

We discuss the description of the proton structure function within the dipole factorisation framework. We parametrise the forward dipole amplitude to account for saturation as predicted by the small-x QCD evolution equations. Contrarily to previous models, the saturation scale does not decrease when taking heavy quarks into account. We show that the same dipole amplitude also allows to reproduce diffractive data and exclusive vector meson production.