Next-to-Leading Order QCD Analysis of Polarized Deep Inelastic Scattering Data

We present a Next-to-Leading order perturbative QCD analysis of world data on the spin dependent structure functions $g_1^p, g_1^n$, and $g_1^d$, including the new experimental information on the $Q^2$ dependence of $g_1^n$. Careful attention is paid to the experimental and theoretical uncertainties. The data constrain the first moments of the polarized valence quark distributions, but only qualitatively constrain the polarized sea quark and gluon distributions. The NLO results are used to determine the $Q^2$ dependence of the ratio $g_1/F_1$ and evolve the experimental data to a constant $Q^2 = 5 GeV^2$. We determine the first moments of the polarized structure functions of the proton and neutron and find agreement with the Bjorken sum rule.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures; final version to be published in Phys. Lett. B. References updated. Uses elsart.cls version 1996/04/22, 2e-1.4