Single inclusive hadron production in pA collisions at NLO

TL;DR

This paper investigates single inclusive hadron production in proton-nucleus collisions at high energies using NLO calculations within the Color Glass Condensate framework, addressing issues of negative cross sections at high transverse momentum.

Contribution

It introduces an explicit rapidity factorization scale to handle divergences, improving the stability of NLO predictions in the CGC framework.

Findings

NLO corrections are large and negative at high transverse momentum.

Introducing a rapidity factorization scale mitigates negative cross section issues.

The approach enhances the reliability of theoretical predictions for pA collisions.

Abstract

We study single inclusive forward hadron production in high energy proton-nucleus collisions at next-to-leading order in the Color Glass Condensate framework. Recent studies have shown that the next-to-leading order corrections to this process are large and negative at large transverse momentum, leading to negative cross sections. We propose to overcome this difficulty by introducing an explicit rapidity factorization scale when subtracting the rapidity divergence into the evolution of the target.