Small-x behavior and parton saturation: A QCD model

Abstract

A QCD model is defined to study questions of quark and gluon parton saturation at small x-values. The model uses a source consisting of a nucleus of heavy quarkonium bound states, states well understood in QCD. Deeply inelastic scattering, using the currents j(x) = −14FμνaFμνa and jμ(x) = ψγμψ, is evaluated in Born and one-loop approximation in order to extract quark and gluon distributions. Quark distributions are observed to saturate while gluon distributions have a saturating and a nonsaturating component.