Scattering of gluons from the color glass condensate

Abstract

We prove that the inclusive single-gluon production cross section for a hadron colliding with a high-density target factorizes into the gluon distribution function of the projectile, defined as usual within the DGLAP collinear approximation, times the cross section for scattering of a single gluon on the strong classical color field of the target. We then derive the gluon–proton (nucleus) inelastic cross section and show that it is (up to logarithms) infrared safe and that it grows slowly with center of mass energy. Furthermore, we discuss jet transverse momentum broadening for the case of nuclear targets. We show that in the saturation regime, in contrast to the perturbative regime, the width of the transverse momentum distribution is infrared finite and grows rapidly with energy and rapidity. In both regimes, however, transverse momentum broadening exhibits the same A dependence.