Heavy Quark Effects in the Virtual Photon Structure Functions

TL;DR

This paper examines how heavy quark masses influence the virtual photon structure functions using the mass-independent RGE framework, combining parton picture and OPE, with NLO QCD numerical evaluations.

Contribution

It introduces a formalism that incorporates heavy quark mass effects into the analysis of virtual photon structure functions using RGE, parton picture, and OPE methods.

Findings

Numerical evaluation of $F_{ m eff}^{eta}(x, Q^2, P^2)$ at NLO in QCD.

Analysis of heavy quark mass effects on structure functions.

Comparison of parton picture and OPE approaches.

Abstract

We investigate the heavy quark mass effects in the virtual photon structure functions $F_{2}^{\gamma}(x, Q^2, P^2)$ and $F_{L}^{\gamma}(x, Q^2, P^2)$ in the framework of the mass-independent renormalization group equation (RGE). We study a formalism in which the heavy quark mass effects are treated based on parton picture as well as on the operator product expansion (OPE), and perform the numerical evaluation of $F_{\rm eff}^{\gamma}(x, Q^2, P^2)$ to the next-leading order (NLO) in QCD.