The BFKL-Regge factorization and $F_2^b$, $F_2^c$, $F_L$ at HERA: physics implications of nodal properties of the BFKL eigenfunctions

Abstract

The asymptotic freedom is known to split the leading-$\log$ BFKL pomeron into a series of isolated poles in the complex angular momentum plane. One of our earlier findings was that the subleading hard BFKL exchanges decouple from such experimentally important observables as small-$x$ charm, $F_2^c$, and the longitudinal, $F_L$, structure functions of the proton at moderately large $Q^2$. For instance, we predicted precocious BFKL asymptotics of $F_2^c(x,Q^2)$ with intercept of the rightmost BFKL pole $\alpha_{\Pom}(0)-1=\Delta_{\Pom}\approx 0.4$. On the other hand, the small-$x$ open beauty photo- and electro-production probes the vacuum exchange for much smaller color dipoles which entails significant subleading vacuum pole corrections to the small-$x$ behavior. In view of the accumulation of the experimental data on small-$x$ $F_{2}^{c}$, $F_{2}^{b}$ and $F_{L}$ we extend our early predictions to the kinematical domain covered by new HERA measurements. Our parameter-free results agree well with the determination of $F_2^c$, $F_L$ and published H1 results on $F_2^b$ but slightly overshoot the very recent (2008, preliminary) H1 results on $F_2^b$.