Contributions of gluon recombination to saturation phenomena

Abstract

Parton distributions in the small $x$ region are numerically predicted by using a modified DGLAP equation with the GRV-like input distributions. We find that gluon recombination at twist-4 level obviously suppresses the rapid growth of parton densities with $x$ decrease. We show that before the saturation scale $Q^2_s$ is reached, saturation and partial saturation appear in the small $x$ behavior of parton distributions in nucleus and free proton, respectively. The antishadowing contributions to the saturation phenomena are also discussed.