Nonperturbative Effects in Gluon Radiation and Photoproduction of Quark Pairs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a nonperturbative interaction model for gluons and quarks in photon fluctuations, predicting weaker gluon shadowing and suppressed gluon radiation at small transverse momenta, aligning with experimental data.

Contribution

It develops a nonperturbative interaction framework fixed by data, improving predictions of gluon shadowing and radiation beyond perturbative QCD.

Findings

Gluon shadowing is weaker and delayed at small x.

Gluon shadowing remains nearly scale invariant up to Q^2 ~ 4 GeV^2.

Nonperturbative interactions significantly suppress low transverse momentum gluon radiation.

Abstract

We introduce a nonperturbative interaction for light-cone fluctuations containing quarks and gluons. The $\bar qq$ interaction squeezes the transverse size of these fluctuations in the photon and one does not need to simulate this effect via effective quark masses. The strength of this interaction is fixed by data. Data on diffractive dissociation of hadrons and photons show that the nonperturbative interaction of gluons is much stronger. We fix the parameters for the nonperturbative quark-gluon interaction by data for diffractive dissociation to large masses (triple-Pomeron regime). This allows us to predict nuclear shadowing for gluons which turns out to be not as strong as perturbative QCD predicts. We expect a delayed onset of gluon shadowing at $x \leq 10^{-2}$ shadowing of quarks. Gluon shadowing turns out to be nearly scale invariant up to virtualities $Q^2\sim 4 GeV^2$ due to presence of a semihard scale characterizing the strong nonperturbative interaction of gluons. We use the same concept to improve our description of gluon bremsstrahlung which is related to the distribution function for a quark-gluon fluctuation and the interaction cross section of a $\bar qqG$ fluctuation with a nucleon. We expect the nonperturbative interaction to suppress dramatically the gluon radiation at small transverse momenta compared to perturbative calculations.