Effects of Longitudinal Photons

Abstract

The description of longitudinal photons is far from trivial, and their phenomenological importance is largely unknown. While the cross section for direct interactions is calculable, an even more important contribution could come from resolved states. In the development of our model for the interactions of (real and) virtual photons, we have modeled resolved longitudinal effects by simple multiplicative factors on the resolved transverse-photon contributions. Recently, a first set of parton distributions for longitudinal virtual photons has been presented by Chýla. We therefore compare their impact on some representative distributions, relative to the simpler approaches.