English

Inclusive prompt photon production in electron-nucleus scattering at small x

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2018-05-08 v1 Nuclear Experiment Nuclear Theory

Abstract

We compute the differential cross-section for inclusive prompt photon production in deeply inelastic scattering (DIS) of electrons on nuclei at small xx in the framework of the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) effective theory. The leading order (LO) computation in this framework resums leading logarithms in xx as well as power corrections to all orders in Qs,A2/Q2Q_{s,A}^2/Q^2, where Qs,A(x)Q_{s,A}(x) is the nuclear saturation scale. This LO result is proportional to universal dipole and quadrupole Wilson line correlators in the nucleus. In the soft photon limit, the Low-Burnett-Kroll theorem allows us to recover existing results on inclusive DIS dijet production. The kk_{\perp} and collinearly factorized expressions for prompt photon production in DIS are also recovered in a leading twist approximation to our result. In the latter case, our result corresponds to the dominant next-to-leading order (NLO) perturbative QCD contribution at small xx. We next discuss the computation of the NLO corrections to inclusive prompt photon production in the CGC framework. In particular, we emphasize the advantages for higher order computations in inclusive photon production, and for fully inclusive DIS, arising from the simple momentum space structure of the dressed quark and gluon "shock wave" propagators in the "wrong" light cone gauge A=0A^-=0 for a nucleus moving with PN+P^{+}_{N} \rightarrow \infty.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1802.09550,
  title  = {Inclusive prompt photon production in electron-nucleus scattering at small x},
  author = {Kaushik Roy and Raju Venugopalan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.09550},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

33 pages, 19 figures