Dijet impact factor in DIS at next-to-leading order in the Color Glass Condensate

TL;DR

This paper calculates the next-to-leading order impact factor for inclusive dijet production in deep inelastic scattering at small x, using the Color Glass Condensate framework, enhancing the precision of gluon saturation studies at the Electron-Ion Collider.

Contribution

It provides the first NLO impact factor calculation for inclusive dijets in DIS within the CGC framework, incorporating all relevant contributions and linking to the JIMWLK evolution.

Findings

Impact factor computed at NLO accuracy.

Explicit demonstration of JIMWLK evolution at leading logarithmic order.

Enhanced precision for gluon saturation signals at EIC.

Abstract

We compute the next-to-leading order impact factor for inclusive dijet production in deeply inelastic electron-nucleus scattering at small $x_{\rm Bj}$. Our computation, performed in the framework of the Color Glass Condensate effective field theory, includes all real and virtual contributions in the gluon shock wave background of all-twist lightlike Wilson line correlators. We demonstrate explicitly that the rapidity evolution of these correlators, to leading logarithmic accuracy, is described by the JIMWLK Hamiltonian. When combined with the next-to-leading order JIMWLK Hamiltonian, our results for the impact factor improve the accuracy of the inclusive dijet cross section to $\mathcal{O}(\alpha_s^2 \ln(x_f/x_{\rm Bj}))$, where $x_f$ is a rapidity factorization scale. These results are an essential ingredient in assessing the discovery potential of inclusive dijets to uncover the physics of gluon saturation at the Electron-Ion Collider.