Numerical Solution of the Evolution Equation for Orbital Angular Momentum of Partons in the Nucleon

Abstract

The evolution of orbital angular momentum distributions within the radiative parton model is studied. We use different scenarios for the helicity weighted parton distributions and consider a broad range of input distributions for orbital angular momentum. In all cases we are lead to the conclusion that the absolute value of the average angular momentum per parton peaks at relatively large $x\approx 0.1$ for perturbatively accessible scales. Furthermore, in all scenarios considered here the average orbital angular momentum per parton is several times larger for gluons than for quarks which favours gluon initiated reactions to measure orbital angular momentum. The large gluon polarization typically obtained in NLO-fits to DIS data is primarily canceled by the gluon orbital angular momentum.