Heavy Quark Impact Factor at Nexttoleading Level.pdfVIP

Preprint typeset in JHEP style. - HYPER VERSION DFF/350/03/00 TTP00-06 Heavy Quark Impact Factor at Next-to-leading Level ∗ 0 0 0 2 r p A M. Ciafaloni 4 Dipartimento di Fisica, Universit`a di Firenze and INFN, Sezione di Firenze, Largo E. Fermi 2, I-50125 Firenze, Italy. Email: ciafaloni@fi.infn.it 1 v 3 G. Rodrigo 3 0 Institut f¨ur Teoretische Teilchenphysik, Universit¨at Karlsruhe 4 0 D-76128 Karlsruhe, Germany. Email: rodrigo@particle.uni-karlsruhe.de 0 0 / h p Abstract: We further analyze the definition and the calculation of the heavy quark - p impact factor at next-to-leading (NL) log s level, and we provide its analytical ex- e h pression in a previously proposed k-factorization scheme. Our results indicate that : v k-factorization holds at NL level with a properly chosen energy scale, and with the i X same gluonic Green’s function previously found in the massless probe case. r a Keywords: Heavy quarks, small-x, NLO corrections. ∗Work supported in part by the E.U. QCDNET contract FMRX-CT98-0194 and by MURST (Italy). 1. Introduction Recent improvements [1] of the next-to-leading log x (NLx) results [2] in the BFKL framework, have stabilized the small-x behaviour in QCD, so that a phenomenological analysis of deep inelastic processes (DIS) seems now possible. However, both the gluon density (satisfying the improved equation) and the impact factors are needed in order to use k-factorization (Sec. 2) to compute DIS or double DIS processes. So far, NLx impact factors have been found for the unphysical case of massless initial quarks and gluons only [3, 4]. Partial features for massiv