We calculate the gluon structure function of a color dipole in a new approach evaluating the matrix elements of SU(2) gluon field operators separated along a direction close to the light cone. As vacuum state in the pure glue sector, we use a variational ground state of the near-light-cone Hamiltonian. With a mean momentum fraction of the gluons fixed to the "experimental value" in a proton, the resulting gluon structure function for a dipole state with four links is compared qualitatively to the NLO MRST 2002 parameterization at Q 2 = 1.5 GeV 2 .

We report on work in progress in which we calculate the gluon structure function of a color dipole in near light cone SU(2) lattice QCD. The color dipole is represented by a high (nearly infinite) momentum qq state added to the vacuum. We use as vacuum state a variational ground state of the near light cone Hamiltonian. We compute the color dipole matrix element of two transverse gluon momentum operators separated along the light cone, the Fourier transform of which is the gluon structure function. We identify three different contributions which, for large light cone momentum, reproduce the Pomeron behavior of the structure function with unit intercept.