Investigation of proton structure function F2p at HERA in light of an analytical solution to the Balitsky–Kovchegov equation

Abstract

In this paper, the proton structure function F2p(x,Q2) at small-x is investigated using an analytical solution to the Balitsky–Kovchegov (BK) equation. In the context of the color dipole description of deep inelastic scattering (DIS), the structure function F2p(x,Q2) is computed by applying the analytical expression for the scattering amplitude N(k, Y) derived from the BK solution. At transverse momentum k and total rapidity Y, the scattering amplitude N(k, Y) represents the propagation of the quark-antiquark dipole in the color dipole description of DIS. Using the BK solution we extracted the integrated gluon density xg(x, Q 2) and then compared our theoretical estimation with the LHAPDF global data fits, NNPDF3.1sx and CT18. Finally, we have investigated the behavior of F2p(x,Q2) in the kinematic region of 10−5 ≤ x ≤ 10−2 and 2.5 GeV2 ≤ Q 2 ≤ 60 GeV2. Our predicted results for F2p(x,Q2) within the specified kinematic region are in good agreement with the recent high-precision data for F2p(x,Q2) from HERA (H1 Collaboration) and the LHAPDF global parametrization group NNPDF3.1sx.