Color Glass Condensate and its relation to HERA physics

TL;DR

This paper reviews the Color Glass Condensate effective theory, highlighting phenomena like gluon saturation and geometric scaling, and discusses its implications for high-energy QCD scattering and HERA physics.

Contribution

It provides an overview of the CGC formalism, emphasizing the role of next-to-leading order corrections and its application to HERA phenomenology.

Findings

CGC describes high-density gluonic matter in QCD.

Next-to-leading order corrections are crucial for accurate predictions.

Saturation models explain HERA scattering data.

Abstract

I give a brief overview of the effective theory for the Color Glass Condensate, which is the high-density gluonic matter which controls high-energy scattering in QCD in the vicinity of the unitarity limit. I concentrate on fundamental phenomena, like gluon saturation, unitarization, and geometric scaling, and the way how these are encoded in the formalism. I emphasize the importance of the next-to-leading order corrections, especially the running of the coupling, for both conceptual and phenomenological issues. I survey the implications of the CGC theory for the HERA physics and its phenomenological applications based on saturation models.