Damping of the HERA effect in DIS?

Abstract

The drastic rise of the proton structure function F_2(x,Q^2) when the Björken variable x decreases, seen at HERA for a large span of Q^2, negative values for the 4-momentum transfer, may be damped when Q^2 increases beyond several hundreds GeV^2. A new data analysis and a comparison with recent models for the proton structure function is proposed to discuss this phenomenon in terms of the derivative \partial ln F_2(x,Q^2)/\partial ln(1/x).

Comments: 14 pages (LaTeX) including 7 figures, misprints are corrected