Abstract/Summary

It has been observed recently that a consistent LO BFKL gluon evolution leads to a steep growth of F2(x, Q2) for x → 0 almost independently of Q2. We show that current data from the DESY HERA collider are precise enough to finally rule out a pure BFKL behaviour in the accessible small x region. Several attempts have been made by other groups to treat the BFKL type small x resummations instead as additions to the conventional anomalous dimensions of the successful renormalization group “Altarelli-Parisi” equations. We demonstrate that all presently available F2 data, in particular at lower values of Q2, can not be described using the presently known NLO (two-loop consistent) small x resummations. Finally we comment on the common reason for the failure of these BFKL inspired methods which result, in general, in too steep >x-dependencies as x → 0.