Evolution equation for the structure function g_2(x,Q^2)

Abstract

We perform an extensive study of the scale dependence of flavor-singlet contributions to the structure function g_2(x,Q^2) in polarized deep-inelastic scattering. We find that the mixing between quark-antiquark-gluon and three-gluon twist-3 operators only involves the three-gluon operator with the lowest anomalous dimension and is weak in other cases. This means, effectively, that only those three-gluon operators with the lowest anomalous dimension for each moment are important, and allows to formulate a simple two-component parton-like description of g_2(x,Q^2) in analogy with the conventional description of twist-2 parton distributions. The similar simplification was observed earlier for the nonsinglet distributions, although the reason is in our case different.