Scattering off the Color Glass Condensate

Abstract

In this thesis the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) framework, which describes quantum chromodynamics (QCD) at high energy, is applied to various scattering processes. Higher order corrections to the CGC evolution equations, known as the BK and JIMWLK equations, are also considered. It is shown that the leading order CGC calculations describe the experimental data from electron-proton deep inelastic scattering (DIS), proton-proton and proton-nucleus collisions. The initial condition for the BK evolution equation is obtained by performing a fit to deep inelastic scattering data. The fit result is used as an input to calculations of single particle spectra and nuclear suppression in proton-proton and proton-nucleus collisions, which are shown to be in agreement with RHIC and LHC measurements. In particular, the importance of a proper description of the nuclear geometry consistently with the DIS data fits is emphasized, as it results in a nuclear suppression factor $R_{pA}$ which is consistent with the available experimental data. In addition to single particle production, the correlations between two hadrons at forward rapidity are computed. The RHIC measurements are shown to be naturally explainable in the CGC framework, and the previous CGC calculations are improved by including the so called inelastic and double parton scattering contributions. This improvement is shown to be required in order to get results compatible with the experimentally measured correlations. Exclusive vector meson production, which can be a powerful tool to study the gluonic structure of nuclei at small Bjorken-$x$, is also considered. The cross sections are calculated within the CGC framework in the context of a future electron-ion collider. In particular, the cross section for incoherent diffractive vector meson production is derived and a centrality estimator for this process is proposed.

PhD thesis, 98 pages. ISBN 978-951-39-6175-6

References in corpus (19)

• Glauber Modeling in High Energy Nuclear Collisions
• Global analysis of fragmentation functions for pions and kaons and their uncertainties
• Universality of Unintegrated Gluon Distributions at small x
• Quark contribution to the small-$x$ evolution of color dipole
• Analysis of combined HERA data in the Impact-Parameter dependent Saturation model
• Non-linear QCD meets data: A global analysis of lepton-proton scattering with running coupling BK evolution
• Forward inclusive dijet production and azimuthal correlations in pA collisions
• Resumming double logarithms in the QCD evolution of color dipoles
• CGC predictions for p+Pb collisions at the LHC
• Saturation QCD predictions with heavy quarks at HERA
• Single-inclusive particle production in proton-nucleus collisions at next-to-leading order in the hybrid formalism
• Forward $J/\psi$ production in proton-nucleus collisions at high energy
• Nuclear effects on the transverse momentum spectra of charged particles in pPb collisions at a nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energy of 5.02 TeV
• Universality of multi-particle production in QCD at high energies
• Multiplicities and $p_T$ spectra in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions from a next-to-leading order improved perturbative QCD + saturation + hydrodynamics model
• Semi-inclusive photon-hadron production in pp and pA collisions at RHIC and LHC
• Ballistic protons in incoherent exclusive vector meson production as a measure of rare parton fluctuations at an Electron-Ion Collider
• Two-particle azimuthal correlations at forward rapidity in STAR
• An alternative scaling solution for high-energy QCD saturation with running coupling