Evolution of parton densities beyond leading order

Abstract

We develop a technique, based explicitly on the factorization properties of mass singularities, which allows one to calculate the evolution of parton densities beyond leading order. We present the results for the evolution of hadronic structure functions as well as for parton fragmentation functions into hadrons. Within our scheme the predictions for a particular process are obtained by convoluting a universal parton density with a “short-distance” cross section specific to the process. As an application, we calculate the QCD predictions for the Q2 dependence of deep inelastic lepton-hadron scattering and of one-particle iclusive e+ e− annihilation cross sections. Our results for electroproduction agree with those obtained with the operator product expansion technique. Physical quantities in scattering are related to the corresponding ones in annihilation by analytic continuation, whereas the Gribov-Lipatov relation is strongly violated.