Parton densities and structure functions at next-to-next-to-leading order and beyond

Abstract

We summarize recent results on the evolution of unpolarized parton densities and deep-inelastic structure functions in massless perturbative QCD. Due to last year's extension of the integer-moment calculations of the three-loop splitting functions, the NNLO evolution of the parton distributions can now be performed reliably at momentum fractions x >= 10^-4, facilitating a considerably improved theoretical accuracy of their extraction from data on deep-inelastic scattering. The NNLO corrections are not dominated, at relevant values of x, by their leading small-x terms. At large x the splitting-function series converges very rapidly, hence, employing results on the three-loop coefficient functions, the structure functions can be analysed at N^3LO for x > 10^-2. The resulting values for alpha_s do not significantly change beyond NNLO, their renormalization scale dependence reaches about +-1% at N^3LO.