Orbital angular momentum at small x revisited

Abstract

Abstract We revisit the problem of the small Bjorken-x asymptotics of the quark and gluon orbital angular momentum (OAM) distributions in the proton utilizing the revised small-x helicity evolution derived recently in [1]. We relate the quark and gluon OAM distributions at small x to the polarized dipole amplitudes and their (first) impact-parameter moments. To obtain the OAM distributions, we derive novel small-x evolution equations for the impact-parameter moments of the polarized dipole amplitudes in the double-logarithmic approximation (summing powers of αs ln2(1/x) with αs the strong coupling constant). We solve these evolution equations numerically and extract the leading large-Nc, small-x asymptotics of the quark and gluon OAM distributions, which we determine to be$$ {L}_{q+\overline{q}}\left(x,{Q}^2\right)\sim {L}_G\left(x,{Q}^2\right)\sim \Delta \Sigma \left(x,{Q}^2\right)\sim \Delta G\left(x,{Q}^2\right)\sim {\left(\frac{1}{2}\right)}^{3.66\sqrt{\frac{\alpha_s{N}_c}{2\uppi}}}, $$ L q + q ¯ x Q 2 ~ L G x Q 2 ~ ∆ Σ x Q 2 ~ ∆ G x Q 2 ~ 1 2 3.66 α s N c 2 π , in agreement with [2] within the precision of our numerical evaluation. (Here Nc is the number of quark colors.) We also investigate the ratios of the quark and gluon OAM distributions to their helicity distribution counterparts in the small-x region.