Heavy flavour production in pA collisions

Abstract

Heavy-quark production in high-energy proton–nucleus (pA) collisions is described in the framework of the colour glass condensate. k⊥ factorization is broken even at leading order albeit a more general factorization in pA holds at this order in terms of two-, three- and four-point correlators of Wilson lines in the nuclear target. The x-evolution of these correlators is computed in the large A and large N mean-field limit of the Balitsky–Kovchegov equation. We show results for heavy-quark production at RHIC and LHC energies.