Tracing the origin of azimuthal gluon correlations in the color glass condensate

TL;DR

This paper investigates how azimuthal correlations in high energy proton-nucleus collisions originate from fluctuating color fields within the color glass condensate (CGC) framework, providing theoretical insights and models.

Contribution

It demonstrates how CGC physics generates azimuthal multiparticle correlations and connects a color field domain model to non-Gaussian correlations in the CGC theory.

Findings

CGC generates azimuthal correlations in proton-nucleus collisions.

Different CGC approximation schemes show qualitative and quantitative differences.

A color field domain model captures key features of observed correlations.

Abstract

We examine the origins of azimuthal correlations observed in high energy proton-nucleus collisions by considering the simple example of the scattering of uncorrelated partons off color fields in a large nucleus. We demonstrate how the physics of fluctuating color fields in the color glass condensate (CGC) effective theory generates these azimuthal multiparticle correlations and compute the corresponding Fourier coefficients v_n within different CGC approximation schemes. We discuss in detail the qualitative and quantitative differences between the different schemes. We will show how a recently introduced color field domain model that captures key features of the observed azimuthal correlations can be understood in the CGC effective theory as a model of non-Gaussian correlations in the target nucleus.