Gluon saturation and Feynman scaling in leading neutron production

Abstract

In this paper we extend the color dipole formalism to the study of leading neutron production in $e+p\to e+n+X$ collisions at high energies and estimate the related observables, which were measured at HERA and may be analysed in future electron-proton ($ep$) colliders. In particular, we calculate the Feynman $x_F$ distribution of leading neutrons, which is expressed in terms of the pion flux and the photon-pion total cross section. In the color dipole formalism, the photon-pion cross section is described in terms of the dipole-pion scattering amplitude, which contains information about the QCD dynamics at high energies and gluon saturation effects. We consider different models for the scattering amplitude, which have been used to describe the inclusive and diffractive $ep$ HERA data. Moreover, the model dependence of our predictions with the description of the pion flux is analysed in detail. We show that the recently released H1 leading neutron spectra can be reproduced using the color dipole formalism and that these spectra could help us to observe more clearly gluon saturation effects in future $ep$ colliders.

10 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (6)

• The Color Glass Condensate
• Impact parameter dependent colour glass condensate dipole model
• Saturation QCD predictions with heavy quarks at HERA
• Leading neutron spectra
• Pion momentum distributions in the nucleon in chiral effective theory
• Damping of forward neutrons in pp collisions

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• Exclusive processes with a leading neutron in $ep$ collisions
• Exclusive vector meson production with a leading neutron in photon - hadron interactions at hadronic colliders
• Photoproduction of $a_2(1320)$ in a Regge model
• Leading neutron production at the EIC and LHeC: estimating the impact of the absorptive corrections
• Investigating saturation effects and the virtual pion in leading neutron events at HERA with the dipole model
• Exclusive vector meson production with leading neutrons in a saturation model for the dipole amplitude in mixed space
• Exclusive vector meson photoproduction with a leading baryon in photon - hadron interactions at hadronic colliders
• Geometric scaling in leading neutron events at HERA
• Dipole-pion cross section in the saturation regime