Probing proton fluctuations with asymmetric rapidity correlations

Abstract

Intrinsic fluctuations of the proton saturation momentum generate asymmetric rapidity distributions on an event-by-event basis. We argue that the asymmetric component, $⟨a_1^2⟩$, of the orthogonal polynomial decomposition of the two-particle rapidity correlation function is a sensitive probe to this distribution of fluctuations. We present a simple model connecting the experimentally measured $⟨a_1^2⟩$ to the variance, $\sigma$, of the distribution of the logarithm of the proton saturation scale. We find that $\sigma \approx 0.5-1$ describes the asymmetric component of the rapidity correlations recently measured by the ATLAS collaboration.

Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. C

References in corpus (2)

• Longitudinal fluctuations of the fireball density in heavy-ion collisions
• On the probability distribution of the stochastic saturation scale in QCD

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• Correlation functions of net-proton multiplicity distributions in Au + Au collisions at energies available at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider from a multiphase transport model
• Rapidity dependence of transverse-momentum multiplicity correlations
• Saturation scale fluctuations and multi-particle rapidity correlations
• Forward-backward multiplicity correlations at the LHC from independent sources
• 3-D Glasma initial state from small-x evolution
• Energy dependence of the proton geometry in exclusive vector meson production