Scaling violations and the gluon distribution of the nucleon

Using recent data on deep inelastic lepton-nucleon scattering an attempt is made to extract the gluon distributionG(x, Q ²=4 GeV²) from the observed scaling violations of structure functions. The accuracy of the data allows only for a rough determination of the gluon distribution. In particular it is found that a hard gluon distributionis consistent with present measurements. Implications of the hard gluon distribution for charm production in the gluon fusion model and for the perturbative contributions to σ _L /σ _T are further discussed. Finally, analytic parametrizations of the QCDx- andQ ²-dependence of quark and gluon distributions are presented facilitating further possible applications.