Determination of the Gluon Distribution Function of the Nucleon Using Energy-Energy Angular Pattern in Deep-Inelastic Muon-Deuteron Scattering

Government nor any agency thereof, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, expressed or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference herein to any speciic commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or any agency thereof. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reeect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof. Abstract We have used the energy-energy angular pattern of hadrons in inelastic muon-deuteron scattering to study perturbative QCD eeects and to extract the gluon distribution function G() of the nucleon, where is the fractional momentum carried by the gluon. The data were taken with the E665 spectrometer using the Fermilab Teva-tron muon beam with a mean beam energy of 490 GeV. We present G() for 0:005 < < 0:05 and at an average Q 2 of 8 GeV 2 using this new technique. We nd that G() in this region can be described by G() / with = ?0:870:09(stat:) 0:32 0:37 (sys:). We compare our results to expectations from various parametrizations of the parton distribution function and also to results from HERA.