DETERMINATION OF THE GLUON DISTRIBUTION FUNCTION OF THE NUCLEON USINGENERGY-ENERGY ANGULAR PATTERN IN DEEP-INELASTIC MUON-DEUTERON SCATTERING

We have used the energy-energy angular pattern of hadrons in inelastic muon-deuteron scattering to study perturbative QCD effects and to ext ract the gluon distribution function eta G(eta) of the nucleon, where eta is the fractional momentum carried by the gluon. The data were tak en with the E665 spectrometer using the Fermilab Tevatron muon beam wi th a mean beam energy of 490 GeV. We present eta G(eta) for 0.005 < et a < 0.05 and at an average Q(2) of 8 GeV2 using this new technique. We find that eta G(eta) in this region can be described by eta G(eta) pr oportional to eta(lambda) with lambda = -0.87+/-0.09(stat.)+/-(0.32)(0 .37)(sys.). We compare our results to expectations from various parame trizations of the parton distribution function and also to results fro m HERA.