Abstract
We examine the origins of azimuthal correlations observed in high energy proton-nucleus collisions by considering the simple example of the scattering of uncorrelated partons off color fields in a large nucleus. We demonstrate how the physics of fluctuating color fields in the color glass condensate (CGC) effective theory generates these azimuthal multiparticle correlations and compute the corresponding Fourier coefficients v_n within different CGC approximation schemes. We discuss in detail the qualitative and quantitative differences between the different schemes. We will show how a recently introduced color field domain model that captures key features of the observed azimuthal correlations can be understood in the CGC effective theory as a model of non-Gaussian correlations in the target nucleus.
Highlights
The projectile but large in the target nucleus
We examine the origins of azimuthal correlations observed in high energy proton-nucleus collisions by considering the simple example of the scattering of uncorrelated partons off color fields in a large nucleus
We demonstrate how the physics of fluctuating color fields in the color glass condensate (CGC) effective theory generates these azimuthal multiparticle correlations and compute the corresponding Fourier coefficients vn within different CGC approximation schemes
Summary
We begin our discussion of the physics of initial state correlations with the simplest possible example of the high energy scattering of individual (uncorrelated) quarks off a large nucleus. Our general picture is that each parton scatters independently off the color field of the nucleus receiving a transverse momentum kick in the process. When two (or more) quarks scatter off the same domain, they will receive a similar kick whenever they are in the same color state. This leads to a correlation which is suppressed by 1/Nc2 (in the limit of large Nc) and the number of domains Q2s S⊥, where S⊥ denotes the transverse area probed by the projectile. We will discuss this physical picture in in more detail and further develop its quantitative implementation along the lines of the discussion in ref. [13]
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