Minijet transverse-energy production in the next-to-leading order in hadron and nuclear collisions

Abstract

The transverse energy flow generated by minijets in hadron and nuclear collisions into a given rapidity window in the central region is calculated in the next-to-leading (NLO) order in QCD at RHIC and LHC energies. The NLO transverse energy production in pp collisions cross sections are larger than the LO ones by the factors of K_{RHIC} ~ 1.9 and K_{LHC} ~ 2.1 at RHIC and LHC energies correspondingly. These results were then used to calculate transverse energy spectrum in nuclear collisions in a Glauber geometrical model. We show that accounting for NLO corrections in the elementary pp collisions leads to a substantial broadening of the E_{perp} distribution for the nuclear ones, while its form remains practically unchanged.