Gluon splitting at small $x$: a unified derivation for the JIMWLK, DGLAP and CSS equations
Abstract
We revisit the calculation of the next-to-leading order (NLO) corrections to dijet production in electron-ion collisions at small . We focus on the back-to-back configuration where the relative transverse momentum of the measured jets is much larger than both their momentum imbalance and the target saturation momentum . In this regime, we present for the first time a complete calculation of the real NLO corrections at leading power in . 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 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 and the transverse momentum transferred by the target are large compared to , 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.
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