Color fluctuation effects in proton-nucleus collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how color fluctuations in proton-nucleus collisions influence inelastic diffraction and collision geometry, suggesting they can be observed through specific experimental triggers.

Contribution

It introduces the impact of color fluctuations on collision fluctuations and proposes experimental methods to observe these effects in pA collisions.

Findings

Color fluctuations significantly affect the number of wounded nucleons.

Standard collision selection methods bias the interaction strength.

Hard trigger studies can reveal color fluctuation effects.

Abstract

Color fluctuations in hadron-hadron collisions are responsible for the presence of inelastic diffraction and lead to distinctive differences between the Gribov picture of high energy scattering and the low energy Glauber picture. We find that color fluctuations give a larger contribution to the fluctuations of the number of wounded nucleons than the fluctuations of the number of nucleons at a given impact parameter. The two contributions for the impact parameter averaged fluctuations are comparable. As a result, standard procedures for selecting peripheral (central) collisions lead to selection of configurations in the projectile which interact with smaller (larger) than average strength. We suggest that studies of pA collisions with a hard trigger may allow to observe effects of color fluctuations.