Forward gluon production in hadron–hadron scattering with pomeron loops

Abstract

We discuss new physical phenomena expected in particle production in hadron–hadron collisions at high energy, as a consequence of pomeron loop effects in the evolution equations for the color glass condensate. We focus on gluon production in asymmetric, ‘dilute–dense’, collisions: a dilute projectile scatters off a dense hadronic target, whose gluon distribution is highly evolved. This situation is representative for particle production in proton–proton collisions at forward rapidities (say, at LHC) and admits a dipole factorization similar to that of deep inelastic scattering (DIS). We show that at sufficiently large forward rapidities, where the pomeron loop effects become important in the evolution of the target wavefunction, gluon production is dominated by ‘black spots’ (saturated gluon configurations) up to very large values of the transverse momentum, well above the average saturation momentum in the target. In this regime, the produced gluon spectrum exhibits diffusive scaling, so like DIS at sufficiently high energy.