Importance of a Measurement of F_L(x,Q^2) at HERA

Abstract

I investigate what a direct measurement of the longitudinal structure function F_L(x,Q^2) could teach us about the structure of the proton and the best way in which to use perturbative QCD for structure functions. I assume HERA running at a lowered beam energy for approximately 4-5 months and examine how well the measurement could distinguish between different theoretical approaches. I conclude that such a measurement would provide useful information on how to calculate structure functions and parton distributions at small x.

To be published in the proceedings of the Ringberg Workshop on "New Trends in HERA Physics 2005"

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Investigating F_L(x,Q2) at fixed energy in the color dipole formalism
• Critical tests of unintegrated gluon distributions