Asymptotic freedom beyond the leading order

The authors make a quantitative analysis of the full G/sup 2/ interaction corrections to the leading Q/sup 2/ dependence of nu W/sub 2/ at x>or=0.4, as given by an asymptotically free gauge theory. It turns out that due to partial cancellations between various contributions the g/sup 2/ corrections are small. The best fit with the SLAC ep data after including the g/sup 2/ corrections is almost identical to that without these corrections, the only effect being a change in Lambda , the one free parameter, which sets the scale of the theory. On the other hand the effect of including target mass corrections is to improve the agreement of the prediction for nu W/sub 2//sup ep/ with data for large values of x. (20 refs).