Massive quarks in NLO dipole factorization for DIS: Transverse photon

TL;DR

This paper computes the NLO light cone wave functions for transverse virtual photons with massive quarks, enabling precise predictions of DIS cross sections in the dipole model for comparison with experiments.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed NLO calculation of transverse photon wave functions including quark masses, completing the NLO dipole picture for DIS.

Findings

Calculated NLO wave functions for transverse photons with quark masses.

Derived the NLO correction to the DIS transverse structure function.

Confirmed the quark Pauli form factor at NLO from wave function limits.

Abstract

We calculate the light cone wave functions for the QCD Fock components in a transverse virtual photon necessary for applications at next-to-leading order in the QCD coupling, including quark masses. We present a detailed calculation of both the one loop wave function for the quark-antiquark Fock component and the tree level wave function for the quark-antiquark-gluon Fock component. The quark masses are renormalized in the pole mass scheme, satisfying constraints from the requirement of Lorentz invariance. In particular the quark Pauli form factor at NLO is recovered from the on-shell limit of the quark-antiquark Fock component. We use our result to calculate the next-to-leading order correction to the high energy deep inelastic scattering (DIS) transverse structure function on a dense target in the dipole factorization framework. Together with our earlier result for longitudinal photons, this completes the calculation of the total deep inelastic scattering cross section in the dipole picture with massive quarks at next-to-leading order, enabling a comparison with experimental data.