Scale dependence of hadronic wave functions and parton densities

We study how the components of hadronic wave functions in light-cone quantization depend on the ultraviolet cut-off by relating them in a systematic way to the matrix elements of a class of quark-gluon operators between the QCD vacuum and the hadrons. From this, we derive an infinite set of scale-evolution equations for the individual contributions to parton distributions from the Fock expansion. When summed over all the contributions, we recover the well-known DGLAP equation. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.