Helicity evolution at small x: quark to gluon and gluon to quark transition operators

Abstract

Abstract We include the quark to gluon and gluon to quark shock-wave transition operators into the small Bjorken-x evolution equations for helicity in the flavor-singlet channel derived earlier in [1–3]. While such transitions do not affect the large-Nc version of the evolution equations for helicity, the large-Nc & Nf equations are affected. (Nc and Nf are the numbers of quark colors and flavors, respectively.) We derive the corresponding corrected large-Nc & Nf equations for the polarized dipole amplitudes contributing to the flavor-singlet quark and gluon helicity distributions in the double-logarithmic approximation (DLA), resumming powers of αs ln2(1/x) with αs the strong coupling constant. We solve these equations iteratively and extract the polarized splitting functions up to four loops. We show that our splitting functions agree with the fixed-order perturbative calculations up to and including the existing three-loops results [4–7]. Similar to the large-Nc helicity evolution in the shock-wave approach [8], our large-Nc & Nf small-x splitting functions agree with those obtained in the infrared evolution equations framework from [9, 10] up to three loops, but appear to slightly disagree at four loops.