Light Gluinos and the Parton Structure of the Nucleon

We study the effects of light gluinos with mass below about 1 GeV on the nucleon parton densities and the running of alpha_(S). It is shown that from the available high-statistics DIS data no lower bound on the gluino mass can be derived. Also in the new kinematical region accessible at HERA the influence of such light gluinos on structure f unctions is found to be very small and difficult to detect. For use in more direct searches involving final state signatures we present a radiative estimate of the gluino distribution in the nucleon.Comment: 23 pages, LateX, 8 figures, MPI-PhT/94-22, LMU-3/9

Dynamical Parton Distributions for alpha_{S} Determinations

Precise determinations of the strong coupling constant in hadronic collisions demand sets of parton densities spanning a sufficiently wide range of values for the QCD scale parameter Lambda. For such applications, we supplement the recent GRV parametrization by five sets of dynamically generated parton distributions for Lambda-values corresponding to alpha_{S}(M_{Z}^{2}) between 0.104 and 0.122. Present DIS data, including recent small-x HERA results, do not appreciably discriminate between these sets.Comment: 14 Pages, LateX, 6 figure

Constraints on the proton's gluon distribution from prompt photon production

We analyze the capability of prompt photon production in pp and pp(bar) collisions to constrain the gluon distribution of the proton, considering data from fixed-target experiments as well as collider measurements. Combined fits are performed to these large-p_T direct gamma cross sections and lepton-proton deep-inelastic scattering data in the framework of next-to-leading order perturbative QCD. Special attention is paid to theoretical uncertainties originating from the scale dependence of the results and from the fragmentation contribution to the prompt photon cross section.Comment: 29 Pages, LaTeX, 9 figure