English

Saturation physics at HERA and RHIC: An unified description

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2008-11-26 v2 Nuclear Experiment Nuclear Theory

Abstract

One of the frontiers of QCD which are intensely investigated in high energy experiments is the high energy (small xx) regime, where we expect to observe the non-linear behavior of the theory. In this regime, the growth of the parton distribution should saturate, forming a Color Glass Condensate (CGC). In fact, signals of parton saturation have already been observed both in epep deep inelastic scattering at HERA and in deuteron-gold collisions at RHIC. Currently, the description of the experimental data of these experiments is possible considering different phenomenological saturation models for the two processes within the CGC formalism. In this letter we analyze the universality of these dipole cross section parameterizations and verify that they are not able to describe the HERA and RHIC data simultaneously. We analyze possible improvements in the parameterizations and propose a new parametrization for the forward dipole amplitude which allows us to describe quite well the small-xx epep HERA data on F2F_2 structure function as well as the dAudAu RHIC data on charged hadron spectra. It is an important signature of the universality of the saturation physics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-ph/0608063,
  title  = {Saturation physics at HERA and RHIC: An unified description},
  author = {V. P. Goncalves and M. S. Kugeratski and M. V. T. Machado and F. S. Navarra},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/0608063},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

12 pages, 4 figures. Version to be published in Physics Letters B

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