Extraction of the gluon density of the proton at x

The gluon momentum density xg(x, Q2) of the proton was extracted at Q2 = 20 GeV2 for small values of x between 4 × 10−4 and 10−2 from the scaling violations of the proton structure function F2 measured recently by ZEUS in deep inelastic neutral current ep scattering at HERA. The extraction was performed in two ways. Firstly, using a global NLO fit to the ZEUS data on F2 at low x constrained by measurementsfrom NMC at larger x; and secondly using published approximate methods for the solution of the GLAP QCD evolution equations. Consistent results are obtained. A substantial increase of the gluon density is found at small x in comparison with the NMC result obtained at larger values of x.