Saturation in central-forward jet production in p-Pb collisions at LHC

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that saturation effects in gluon density can be observed through central-forward dijet production in p-Pb collisions at the LHC, showing suppression of jet decorrelations due to gluon saturation.

Contribution

It introduces a framework using high energy factorization and nonlinear QCD evolution to identify saturation effects in jet production at the LHC.

Findings

Successful description of e-p and p-p data features

Prediction of significant suppression of jet decorrelations in p-Pb

Evidence supporting gluon saturation in nuclear collisions

Abstract

We show that saturation can manifest itself in central-forward dijet production in p-A collisions. In spite of large transverse momenta of the jets, the almost back-to-back dijet configurations are able to probe gluon density at low x and low kt. We perform our study in the framework of high energy factorization with the unintegrated gluon density given by a nonlinear QCD evolution equation. We show that the formalism can successfully account for features measured in e-p and p-p data and it predicts significant suppression of the central-forward jet decorrelations in p-Pb compared to p-p, which we attribute to saturation of gluon density in the nucleus.