Paper detail

The role of the running coupling constant in the unveiling of the hadronic structure

One of the main open questions in physics is the understanding of the internal structure of the strongly interacting particles, or hadrons. It is still a challenge to describe consistently the dynamics of scattering processes and hadronic structure at moderate energy scales. The study of Parton Distribution Functions (PDFs) sets a connection between the perturbative and non-perturbative worlds, through the following scheme: one builds models consistent with QCD in a moderate energy range, PDFs are evaluated in these models, and, finally, the scale dependence of these distributions is studied. In these proceedings, we revisit the standard procedure to match non-perturbative models to perturbative QCD, using experimental data. The strong coupling constant plays a central role in the QCD evolution of parton densities. We will extend this procedure with a non-perturbative generalization of the QCD running coupling and use this new development to understand why perturbative treatments are working reasonably well in the context of hadronic models. Vice versa, this new procedure broadens the ways of analyzing the freezing of the running coupling constant.