Next-to-leading order correction to inclusive particle spectra in the color glass condensate framework

Abstract

In F. Gelis et al. [Phys. Rev. D 78, 054019 (2008).], we have analyzed the leading logarithms of energy that appear in the inclusive spectrum of gluons produced in heavy ion collisions, calculated in the color glass condensate framework. The main result of this paper was that these logarithms are intrinsic properties of the colliding projectiles, and that they can be resummed by letting the distributions of color sources in the nuclei evolve according to the Jalilian-Marian-Iancu-McLerran-Weigert-Leonidov-Kovner equation. An essential step in the proof of this factorization result is the calculation of the gluon spectrum at next-to-leading order (NLO), and in particular a functional relationship that expresses the NLO correction as the action of a certain operator on the leading order spectrum. In this paper, we show that this type of relation between spectra at leading order and NLO is not specific to the production of gluons, but that it is in fact generic for inclusive spectra in heavy ion collisions. To illustrate this, we compute up to NLO the inclusive spectrum of some hypothetical scalar fields, either color neutral or colored, that couple to gluons.