A New Approach to the Gluon Structure Function

Abstract

We calculate the gluon structure function of a color dipole in a new approach evaluating the matrix elements of SU(2) gluon field operators separated along a direction close to the light cone. As vacuum state in the pure glue sector, we use a variational ground state of the near-light-cone Hamiltonian. With a mean momentum fraction of the gluons fixed to the "experimental value" in a proton, the resulting gluon structure function for a dipole state with four links is compared qualitatively to the NLO \emph{MRST} 2002 parameterization at $Q^2=1.5 \mathrm{GeV}^2$.