English

Proton breakup in high-energy pA collisions from perturbative QCD

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2009-11-07 v2 High Energy Physics - Experiment Nuclear Theory

Abstract

We argue that the distribution of hadrons near the longitudinal light-cone in central high-energy pA collisions is computable in weak coupling QCD. This is because the density of gluons per unit transverse area in the dense target at saturation provides an intrinsic semi-hard momentum scale, Qs. We predict that the longitudinal distribution of (anti-)baryons and mesons steepens with increasing energy and atomic number of the target, and that the transverse momentum distribution broadens. We show that the evolution of high moments of the longitudinal net baryon distribution with Qs is determined by the anomalous dimension gamma_qq.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-ph/0211324,
  title  = {Proton breakup in high-energy pA collisions from perturbative QCD},
  author = {Adrian Dumitru and Lars Gerland and Mark Strikman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/0211324},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

5 pages, 2 figures, RevTeX; slightly revised version to appear in PRL