Proton structure functions in the dipole picture at next-to-leading order

TL;DR

This paper advances the theoretical prediction of heavy quark production in deep inelastic scattering at high energies by employing a next-to-leading order CGC framework, enabling simultaneous description of light and heavy quark data.

Contribution

It introduces a consistent NLO calculation with massive quarks in the dipole picture, improving the description of small-x phenomena and constraining initial conditions for evolution equations.

Findings

Successful simultaneous description of light and heavy quark data at small x.

Heavy quark data constrains initial conditions for small-x evolution.

First NLO dipole picture calculation with massive quarks.

Abstract

We predict heavy quark production cross sections in Deep Inelastic Scattering at high energy by applying the CGC effective theory. We demonstrate that when the calculation is performed consistently at next-to-leading order accuracy with massive quarks it becomes possible, for the first time in the dipole picture with perturbatively calculated center-of-mass energy evolution, to simultaneously describe both light and heavy quark production data at small $x$. We furthermore show how the heavy quark cross section data provides additional strong constraints on the extracted non-perturbative initial condition for the small-$x$ evolution equations.