English

Gluon splitting at small $x$: a unified derivation for the JIMWLK, DGLAP and CSS equations

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2025-10-10 v1 Nuclear Theory

Abstract

We revisit the calculation of the next-to-leading order (NLO) corrections to dijet production in electron-ion collisions at small xx. We focus on the back-to-back configuration where the relative transverse momentum PP_\perp of the measured jets is much larger than both their momentum imbalance KK_\perp and the target saturation momentum Qs(x,A)Q_s(x,A). In this regime, we present for the first time a complete calculation of the real NLO corrections at leading power in 1/P1/P_\perp. Our result exhibits TMD factorisation, with the same hard factor as at tree-level and a NLO correction to the Weisz\"acker-Williams (WW) gluon transverse momentum dependent (TMD) distribution which involves four Wilson-line operators. By studying different kinematical regimes for KK_\perp and for the radiated gluon, we recover all the quantum evolutions that were previously identified for this process at NLO: the B-JIMWLK high-energy evolution and the CSS evolution of the gluon WW TMD, and the DGLAP evolution of the gluon PDF. When both KK_\perp and the transverse momentum transferred by the target are large compared to QsQ_s, all the Wilson-line operators boil down to the unintegrated gluon distribution and our NLO result for the gluon TMD can be used to isolate the transverse-momentum dependent gluon splitting function.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.08454,
  title  = {Gluon splitting at small $x$: a unified derivation for the JIMWLK, DGLAP and CSS equations},
  author = {Paul Caucal and Edmond Iancu and Farid Salazar and Feng Yuan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.08454},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

47 pages, 3 figures