English

Evolution of the transverse-momentum dependent gluon distribution at small $x$

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2025-05-05 v2 Nuclear Theory

Abstract

Using the colour dipole picture for photon-nucleus interactions at small xx together with the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) effective theory, we demonstrate that the next-to-leading (NLO) order corrections to the cross-section for the inclusive production of a pair of hard jets encode not only the JIMWLK evolution with decreasing xx, but also the DGLAP evolution of the gluon distribution function and the CSS evolution of the gluon transverse momentum dependent (TMD) distribution. The emergent CSS equation takes the form of a rate equation describing the evolution of the dijet distribution in the transverse momentum imbalance KK_\perp when increasing the dijet relative momentum PP_\perp. All three types of evolution become important when both PP_\perp and KK_\perp are much larger than the nuclear saturation momentum Qs(x)Q_s(x) and we propose a framework which encompasses all of them. The solution to the JIMWLK equation provides the source term for the DGLAP evolution with increasing KK_\perp, which in turn generates the initial condition for the CSS evolution with increasing PP_\perp.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.04238,
  title  = {Evolution of the transverse-momentum dependent gluon distribution at small $x$},
  author = {Paul Caucal and Edmond Iancu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.04238},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

8 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in PRD; for more clarity, the Supplemental Material has been merged within the main text