STRUCTURE FUNCTIONS OF THE NUCLEON IN A STATISTICAL-MODEL

Deep inelastic scattering is considered in a statistical model of the nucleon. This incorporates certain features which are absent in the standard parton model such as quantum statistical correlations which play a role in the propagation of particles when considering Feynman diagrams containing internal lines. The inclusion of the O(alpha(s)) corrections in our numerical calculations allows a good fit to the data for x greater-than-or-equal-to 0.25. The fit corresponds to values of temperature and chemical potential of approximately T = 0.067 GeV and mu = 0.133 GeV. The latter values of parameters, however, give rise, for all x, to a large value for R = sigma(L)/sigma(T). Even when taking into account that all measurements of R suffer from large experimental errors due to the weak dependence of the deep inelastic cross section for charged leptons on R, the size of the discrepancy remains unacceptable. This indicates a shortcoming of the statistical model in its present form to reproduce the structure function of the proton.