Non--Singlet QCD Analysis of Deep Inelastic World Data at \boldmath $O(\alpha_s^3)$

Abstract

A non--singlet QCD analysis of the structure function $F_2(x,q^2)$ in LO, NLO, NNLO and N$^3$LO is performed based on the world data for charged lepton scattering. We determine the valence quark parton densities and present their parameterization and that of the correlated errors in a wide range of $x$ and $Q^2$. In the analysis we determined the QCD--scale $\Lambda_{\rm QCD, N_f = 4}^{\bar{\rm MS}} = 265 \pm 27 \MeV {\rm (NLO)}, 226 \pm 25 \MeV {\rm (NNLO)}, 234 \pm 26 \MeV {\rm (N^3LO)}$, with a remainder uncertainty of $\pm 2\MeV$ for the yet unknown 4--loop anomalous dimension, corresponding to $\alpha_s(M_Z^2) = 0.1148 \pm 0.0019 {\rm NLO}, 0.1134 {\tiny{\begin{array}{c} +0.0019 -0.0021 \end{array}}} {\rm NNLO}, 0.1141 {\tiny{\begin{array}{c} +0.0020 -0.0022 \end{array}}} {\rm N^3LO}$. A comparison is performed to other determinations of the QCD scale and $\alpha_s(M_Z^2)$ in deeply inelastic scattering. The higher twist contributions of $F_2^p(x,Q^2)$ and $F_2^d(x,Q^2)$ are extracted in the large $x$ region, subtracting the twist--2 contributions obtained in the NLO, NNLO and N$^3$LO analysis.