Heavy flavour contributions to the spin structure function g_1(x,Q^2) and the Bjorken sum rule

Abstract

We discuss the order alpha_s^2 corrections to the longitudinal spin structure function g_1(x,Q^2,m^2) which are due to heavy flavour contributions. Here Q denotes the virtuality of the photon and m stands for the heavy flavour mass. Since the exact heavy quark coefficient functions are not known yet we have used the asymptotic forms which are strictly speaking only valid in the region Q^2 >> m^2. However an analysis of the exact and asymptotic expressions for F_2^{NLO}(x,Q^2,m^2) and g_1^{LO}(x,Q^2,m^2) reveals that the asymptotic forms can be also used at smaller Q^2. It appears that for the region 0.01 < x < 0.1 the NLO charm quark component can become twice as large as in LO. However it is still much smaller than g_1(x,Q^2) due to light parton contributions. This is in contrast to the observations made for F_2(x,Q^2) at small x. Also the charm quark contribution to the Bjorken sum rule turns out to be very small.