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

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of next-to-leading order corrections on deep inelastic scattering structure functions at small x within the dipole model, emphasizing the importance of the factorization scheme for accurate results.

Contribution

It introduces a consistent factorization scheme for NLO corrections in the dipole formalism, enabling meaningful predictions for DIS cross sections at small x.

Findings

NLO corrections can be significant in the dipole picture.

The choice of factorization scheme critically affects the results.

Consistent schemes yield physically meaningful DIS cross sections.

Abstract

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.