The perturbative proton form factor reexamined

Abstract

We recalculate the proton Dirac form factor based on the perturbative QCD factorization theorem which includes Sudakov suppression. The evolution scale of the proton wave functions and the infrared cutoffs for the Sudakov resummation are carefully chosen, such that the soft divergences from large coupling constants are diminished and perturbative QCD predictions are stablized. We find that the King-Sachrajda model for the proton wave function leads to results which are in better agreement with experimental data compared to the Chernyak-Zhitnitsky wave function.