CCFM Evolution with Unitarity Corrections

We considerably extend our previous analysis of the implementation of an absorptive boundary condition, which mimics saturation effects, on the linear CCFM evolution. We present detailed results for the evolution of the unintegrated gluon density in the presence of saturation and extract the energy dependence of the emerging saturation momentum. We show that CCFM and BFKL evolution lead to almost identical predictions after including the effects of gluon saturation and of the running of the coupling. We moreover elucidate several important and subtle aspects of the CCFM formalism, such as its relation to BFKL, the structure of the angular ordered cascade, and the derivation of more inclusive versions of CCFM. We also propose non--leading modifications of the standard CCFM evolution which may play an important role for phenomenological studies.