Saturation in inclusive production beyond leading logarithm accuracy

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in calculating inclusive forward hadron production within the saturation formalism, emphasizing next-to-leading order corrections, their issues, and potential improvements for better agreement with experimental data.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of NLO calculations in the saturation formalism and discusses solutions to the negativity problem in the cross section at high transverse momentum.

Findings

Numerical results show improved agreement with experimental data.

Identification of the origin of negativity in NLO cross sections.

Proposed modifications include corrected kinematics and rapidity cutoff adjustments.

Abstract

We review recent progress on the calculations on the inclusive forward hadron production within the saturation formalism. After introducing the concept of perturbative parton saturation and nonlinear evolution we discuss the formalism for the forward hadron production at high energy in the leading and next-to-leading order. Numerical results are presented and compared with the experimental data on forward hadron production in $dA$ and $pA$. We discuss the problem of the negativity of the NLO cross section at high transverse momenta, study its origin in detail and present possible improvements which include the corrected kinematics and the suitable choice of the rapidity cutoff.