Regge behaviour of structure function and gluon distribution at low-x in leading order

We present a method to find the gluon distribution from the proton structure function data at low-x assuming the Regge behaviour of the gluon distribution function at this limit. We use the leading order (LO) Altarelli–Parisi (AP) evolution equation in our analysis and compare our result with those of other authors. We also discuss the limitations of the Taylor expansion method in extracting the gluon distribution from the structure function used by those authors. Received: 2 January 2000 / Revised version: 23 February 2000 / Published online: 6 July 2000