Factorization of the soft gluon divergence from the dipole picture deep inelastic scattering cross sections at next-to-leading order

TL;DR

This paper introduces a factorization scheme to handle soft gluon divergences in deep inelastic scattering at NLO, enabling meaningful numerical results and revealing the significance and sensitivity of NLO corrections.

Contribution

It proposes a novel factorization scheme for soft gluon divergences in DIS at NLO, allowing for quantitative analysis of corrections and their dependence on factorization choices.

Findings

NLO corrections are significant and sensitive to factorization scheme details.

The scheme enables meaningful numerical results for DIS cross sections at NLO.

Approximate schemes may lead to problematic behaviors similar to previous issues.

Abstract

We use a factorization scheme analogous to one proposed for single inclusive forward hadron production to factorize the soft gluon divergence present in the deep inelastic scattering cross sections in the dipole picture at next-to-leading order (NLO). We show numerically that in this carefully constructed scheme it is possible to obtain meaningful results for the DIS cross sections at NLO, and so we are able to quantitatively study the recently derived NLO corrections to the DIS cross sections. We find that the NLO corrections can be significant and sensitive to the details of the factorization scheme used for the resummation of the large logarithms into the BK evolution equation. In the case of an approximative factorization scheme we observe a problematic behavior of the DIS cross sections similar to what has been seen with analogously factorized single inclusive cross sections.