APS April Meeting 2015
Volume 60, Number 4
Saturday–Tuesday, April 11–14, 2015;
Baltimore, Maryland
Session E3: Invited Session: Hard Probes in pA Collisions
3:30 PM–5:18 PM,
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Room: Holiday 2
Sponsoring
Unit:
DNP
Chair: Anne Sickles, University of Illinois
Abstract ID: BAPS.2015.APR.E3.1
Abstract: E3.00001 : Color fluctuations in pA collisions at collider energies
3:30 PM–4:06 PM
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Abstract
Author:
Mark Strikman
(Penn State University)
In pA collisions at collider energies a projectile stays in a frozen
configuration over the distances which by far exceed the nuclear diameter.
As a result proton coherently interacts with nucleons along its impact
parameter. In QCD nucleon is build of configurations of different transverse
size which are expected to interact with different strength leading to the
fluctuations of the global strength of the projectile interaction. Also,
configurations of smaller size are expected to have a reduced gluon field
leading to a correlation of soft and hard interactions. The shape of the
distribution over the strength of interaction is strongly constrained by the
diffractive pp data, behavior of the distribution for $\sigma \to $ 0
expected in pQCD, etc [1]. We developed a Monte Carlo procedure for taking
into account these effects in soft collisions and collisions with a hard
trigger taking into account difference of the transverse scales of hard and
soft interactions [2, 3]. We predicted that distribution over the number of
wounded nucleons should be broader than in the Glauber model in agreement
with the recent LHC data. We argue that a strong violation of the Glauber
approximation in the dependence of the rate of forward jet production on
centrality observed in pA collisions at the LHC provides the first
experimental evidence that parton configurations in the projectile proton
containing a parton with large x$_{\mathrm{p}}$ interact with a
nuclei with a significantly smaller than average cross section and have
smaller than average size. Implementing effects of the interaction strength
fluctuations and using the ATLAS analysis of the dependence of the hadron
production at backward rapidities on the number of wounded nucleons, we make
quantitative predictions for the centrality dependence of the jet production
rate as a function of the interaction strength $\sigma $(x$_{\mathrm{p}})$.
We find $\sigma $(x$_{\mathrm{p}} = $ 0.6) $\sim$
$\sigma_{\mathrm{tot}}$(pp)/2 [4] which sheds light on the origin of the
EMC effect. Future pA dijet studies along these lines would allow to
investigate the global 3D structure of the nucleon and in particular trigger
on configurations which interact with the strength larger than average.
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[1] H. Heiselberg, G. Baym, B. Blaettel, L. L. Frankfurt and M. Strikman, Phys. Rev. Lett. 67, 2946 (1991); Phys. Rev. C 52, 1604 (1995)\\[0pt]
[2] M. Alvioli and M. Strikman, Phys. Lett. B 722, 347 (2013) [arXiv:1301.0728 [hep-ph]].\\[0pt]
[3] M. Alvioli, L. Frankfurt, V. Guzey and M. Strikman, Phys. Rev. C 90, no. 3, 034914 (2014) [arXiv:1402.2868 [hep-ph]].\\[0pt]
[4] M. Alvioli, B. Cole, L. Frankfurt and M. Strikman, arXiv:1409.7381 [hep-ph].
To cite this abstract, use the following reference: http://meetings.aps.org/link/BAPS.2015.APR.E3.1