The Gluon Distribution Function and Factorization in Feynman Gauge

A complication in proving factorization theorems in Feynman gauge is that individual graphs give a super-leading power of the hard scale when all the gluons inducing the hard scattering are longitudinally polarized. With the aid of an example in gluon-mediated deep inelastic scattering, we show that, although the super-leading terms cancel after a sum over graphs, there is a residual non-zero leading term from longitudinally polarized gluons. This is due to the non-zero transverse momenta of the gluons in the target. The non-cancellation, due to the non-Abelian property of the gauge group, is necessary to obtain the correct form of the gluon distribution function as a gauge-invariant matrix element.