Production In Proton-nucleus Collisions Research Articles

Prompt photon production in proton–nucleus collisions at LHC: a comparison among color dipole models* *Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. U1832120), the Natural Science Foundation for Outstanding Young Scholars of Hebei Province (Grant No. A2020210012), the S&T Program of Hebei (Grant No. 236Z4601G), and the Scientific Research Foundation for the Introducing Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars

The nuclear modification factor for prompt photon production in proton–nucleus collisions is investigated within color dipole formalism. By means of the Glauber–Gribov approach, the nuclear effects are studied in various rapidity bins with the evolution equation-based saturation models and the phenomenological dipole models. The theoretical results are compared with the experimental data provided by PHENIX, ATLAS and CMS Collaborations. At forward rapidity and midrapidity, a reasonable agreement with the experimental data is shown for the theoretical results with the modified Kharzeev, Levin and Nardi model, and the Kowalski and Teaney model. Then, we analyze the influence of the initial state energy loss effect on the nuclear modification factor and find that it is obvious only at backward rapidity together with small p T. Finally, the theoretical results are also compared with those of JETPHOX Monte Carlo program and the predictive results for the LHCb at very forward rapidities are presented.

Impact of parton energy loss and nPDFs on J/ψ production in proton-nucleus collisions

The impact of parton energy loss and nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs) on J/ψ production in proton-nucleus collisions are investigated by means of the E866, LHC and RHIC experimental data. By the recent EPPS21 nPDFs, a leading order phenomenological analysis of J/ψ production cross-section ratios is performed for E866 experimental data with considering the parton energy loss effect following Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (LPM) regime. The gluon transport coefficient qˆg extracted from the E866 data in 0.20<xF<0.65 region is qˆg=0.35±0.01 GeV2/fm with χ2/ndf=1.01, which indicates that the significantly better-constrained gluon distributions provided by EPPS21 contribute to accurately determining the gluon energy loss. It is founded that for E866 data in 0.20<xF<0.65 the depletion induced by cc¯ energy loss is the largest, gluon energy loss is the second, and quark energy loss is the smallest. In addition, it can be seen that for LHC and RHIC experiment the role of nPDFs and gluon energy loss on J/ψ production are both significant, which indicates that operating more precise measurements at LHC and RHIC in the future can facilitate significantly better-constrained gluon energy loss and nPDFs.

Multi-particle production in proton-nucleus collisions in the Color Glass Condensate

We compute multi-gluon production in the Color Glass Condensate approach in dilute-dense collisions, pA. We include the contributions that are leading in the overlap area of the collision but keep all orders in the expansion in the number of colors. We use a form of the Lipatov vertices that leads to the Wigner function approach for the projectile previously employed, that we generalise to take into account quantum correlations in the projectile wave function. We compute four gluon correlations and we find that the second order four particle cumulant is negative, so a sensible second Fourier azimuthal coefficient can be defined.

Forward dijets in proton-nucleus collisions at next-to-leading order: the real corrections

Using the CGC effective theory together with the hybrid factorisation, we study forward dijet production in proton-nucleus collisions beyond leading order. In this paper, we compute the “real” next-to-leading order (NLO) corrections, i.e. the radiative corrections associated with a three-parton final state, out of which only two are being measured. To that aim, we start by revisiting our previous results for the three-parton cross-section presented in [1]. After some reshuffling of terms, we deduce new expressions for these results, which not only look considerably simpler, but are also physically more transparent. We also correct several errors in this process. The real NLO corrections to inclusive dijet production are then obtained by integrating out the kinematics of any of the three final partons. We explicitly work out the interesting limits where the unmeasured parton is either a soft gluon, or the product of a collinear splitting. We find the expected results in both limits: the B-JIMWLK evolution of the leading-order dijet cross-section in the first case (soft gluon) and, respectively, the DGLAP evolution of the initial and final states in the second case (collinear splitting). The “virtual” NLO corrections to dijet production will be presented in a subsequent publication.

Global extraction of the jet transport coefficient in cold nuclear matter

Within the framework of the generalized QCD factorization formalism, we perform the first global analysis of the jet transport coefficient ($\hat q$) for cold nuclear matter. The analysis takes into account the world data on transverse momentum broadening in semi-inclusive electron-nucleus deep inelastic scattering, Drell-Yan dilepton and heavy quarkonium production in proton-nucleus collisions, as well as the nuclear modification of the structure functions in deep inelastic scattering, comprising a total of 215 data points from 8 data sets. For the first time, we clarify quantitatively the universality and probing scale dependence of the nuclear medium property as encoded in $\hat q$. We expect that the determined parametrization of $\hat q$ in cold nuclear matter will have significant impact on precise identification of the transport property of hot dense medium created in heavy ion collisions.

Four-jet double parton scattering production in proton-nucleus collisions within the pythia8 framework

We present our studies of four-jet double parton scattering production in proton-nucleus collisions within the framework of the PYTHIA8 event generator. We demonstrate that double absorptive processes in pA generated by the Angantyr model in PYTHIA8 give an enhancement of the total double parton scattering cross section similar to the predictions by Strikman and Treleani in 2001. Additionally, we discuss how the growth of activity in a direction of a nucleus affects an A-scaling of a total double parton scattering cross section in proton-nucleus collisions.

Flavor-dependent EMC effect from a nucleon swelling model

We present our results for a flavor-dependent EMC effect based on the nIMParton nuclear PDFs, in which the $x$-dependence is described with a nucleon swelling model. The nuclear correction from nucleon swelling is considered through a modification of the initial valence quark distributions instead of a dynamical rescaling. To probe the flavor-dependence of the model, the experimental observables are calculated applying nIMParton nuclear modifications for various experiments: parity-violating deep inelastic scattering on nuclear target, pion-induced Drell-Yan, and W-boson production in proton-nucleus collisions. In addition, we present the expected effect for the spectator-tagged deep inelastic scattering process, which will be performed by the CLAS12 collaboration with the ALERT detector.

In-medium charmonium production in proton-nucleus collisions

We study charmonium production in proton-nucleus (p-A) collisions focusing on final-state effects caused by the formation of an expanding medium. Toward this end we utilize a rate equation approach within a fireball model as previously employed for a wide range of heavy-ion collisions, adapted to the small systems in p-A collisions. The initial geometry of the fireball is taken from a Monte-Carlo event generator where initial anisotropies are caused by fluctuations. We calculate the centrality and transverse-momentum dependent nuclear modification factor (RpA) as well as elliptic flow (v2) for both J/ψ and ψ(2S) and compare them to experimental data from RHIC and the LHC. While the RpAs show an overall fair agreement with most of the data, the large v2 values observed in p-Pb collisions at the LHC cannot be accounted for in our approach. While the former finding generally supports the formation of a near thermalized QCD medium in small systems, the discrepancy in the v2 suggests that its large observed values are unlikely to be due to the final-state collectivity of the fireball alone.

Forward rapidity isolated photon production in proton-nucleus collisions

We calculate isolated photon production at forward rapidities in proton-nucleus collisions in the Color Glass Condensate framework. Our calculation uses dipole cross sections solved from the running coupling Balitsky-Kovchegov equation with an initial condition fit to deep inelastic scattering data and extended to nuclei with an optical Glauber procedure that introduces no additional parameters beyond the basic nuclear geometry. We present predictions for future forward RHIC and LHC measurements. The predictions are also compared to updated results for the nuclear modification factors for pion production, Drell-Yan dileptons and J/ψ mesons in the same forward kinematics, consistently calculated in the same theoretical framework. We find that leading order, running coupling high energy evolution in the CGC picture leads to a significant nuclear suppression at forward rapidities. This nuclear suppression is stronger for photons than for pions. We also discuss how this might change with next-to-leading order high energy evolution.

On the use of a running coupling in the calculation of forward hadron production at next-to-leading order

We study a puzzle raised recently regarding the running coupling prescription used in the calculation of forward particle production in proton-nucleus collisions at next-to-leading order: using a coordinate space prescription which is consistent with the one used in the high energy evolution of the target leads to results which can be two orders of magnitude larger than the ones obtained with a momentum space prescription. We show that this is an artefact of the Fourier transform involved when passing between coordinate and momentum space and propose a new coordinate space prescription which avoids this problem.

Soft photon and two hard jets forward production in proton-nucleus collisions

We calculate the cross section for production of a soft photon and two hard jets in the forward rapidity region in proton-nucleus collisions at high energies. The calculation is performed within the hybrid formalism. The hardness of the final particles is defined with respect to the saturation scale of the nucleus. We consider both the correlation limit of small momentum imbalance and the dilute target limit where the momentum imbalance is of the order of the hardness of the jets. The results depend on the first two transversemomentum-dependent (TMD) gluon distributions of the nucleus.

Isolated photon production in proton-nucleus collisions at forward rapidity

We calculate isolated photon production at forward rapidities in proton-nucleus collisions in the Color Glass Condensate framework. Our calculation uses dipole cross sections solved from the running coupling Balitsky-Kovchegov equation with an initial condition fit to deep inelastic scattering data. For comparison, we also update the results for the nuclear modification factor for pion production in the same kinematics. We present predictions for future forward RHIC and LHC measurements at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200$ GeV and $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=8$ TeV.

Use of a running coupling in the NLO calculation of forward hadron production

We address and solve a puzzle raised by a recent calculation [1] of the cross-section for particle production in proton-nucleus collisions to next-to-leading order: the numerical results show an un- reasonably large dependence upon the choice of a prescription for the QCD running coupling, which spoils the predictive power of the calculation. Specifically, the results obtained with a prescription formulated in the transverse coordinate space differ by one to two orders of magnitude from those obtained with a prescription in momentum space. We show that this discrepancy is an artefact of the interplay between the asymptotic freedom of QCD and the Fourier transform from coordinate space to momentum space. When used in coordinate space, the running coupling can act as a fictitious potential which mimics hard scattering and thus introduces a spurious contribution to the cross-section. We identify a new coordinate-space prescription which avoids this problem and leads to results consistent with those obtained with the momentum-space prescription.

Σ0 production in proton nucleus collisions near threshold

The production of Σ0 baryons in the nuclear reaction p (3.5 GeV) + Nb (corresponding to sNN=3.18 GeV) is studied with the detector set-up HADES at GSI, Darmstadt. Σ0s were identified via the decay Σ0→Λγ with subsequent decays Λ→pπ− in coincidence with a e+e− pair from either external (γ→e+e−) or internal (Dalitz decay γ⁎→e+e−) gamma conversions. The differential Σ0 cross section integrated over the detector acceptance, i.e. the rapidity interval 0.5<y<1.1, has been extracted as ΔσΣ0=2.3±(0.2)stat±(−0.6+0.6)sys±(0.2)norm mb, yielding the inclusive production cross section in full phase space σΣ0total=5.8±(0.5)stat±(−1.4+1.4)sys±(0.6)norm±(1.7)extrapol mb by averaging over different extrapolation methods. The Λall/Σ0 ratio within the HADES acceptance is equal to 2.3±(0.2)stat±(−0.6+0.6)sys. The obtained rapidity and momentum distributions are compared to transport model calculations. The Σ0 yield agrees with the statistical model of particle production in nuclear reactions.

Forward particle production in proton-nucleus collisions at next-to-leading order

We consider the next-to-leading order (NLO) calculation of single inclusive particle production at forward rapidities in proton-nucleus collisions and in the framework of the Color Glass Condensate (CGC). We focus on the quark channel and the corrections associated with the impact factor. In the first step of the evolution the kinematics of the emitted gluon is kept exactly (and not in the eikonal approximation), but such a treatment which includes NLO corrections is not explicitly separated from the high energy evolution. Thus, in this newly established “factorization scheme”, there is no “rapidity subtraction”. The latter suffers from fine tuning issues and eventually leads to an unphysical (negative) cross section. On the contrary, our reorganization of the perturbation theory leads by definition to a well-defined cross section and the numerical evaluation of the NLO correction is shown to have the correct size.

Subthreshold Ξ− production in proton-nucleus collisions in a BUU model

We study the production of the doubly strange Ξ baryon in subthreshold p + A collisions using a BUU type transport model. We propose a new mechanism for Ξ creation in a two-step process via hyperon-nucleon collisions. We study the influence of the anisotropy of hyperon production in N + N collisions on the Ξ multiplicity. Applying reasonable assumptions on the unknown elementary cross sections, we are able to reconstruct the Ξ yield observed by the HADES collaboration (GSI, Darmstadt) in subthreshold p+Nb collisions.

Observation of Top Quark Production in Proton-Nucleus Collisions.

The first observation of top quark production in proton-nucleus collisions is reported using proton-lead data collected by the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC at a nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energy of sqrt[s_{NN}]=8.16 TeV. The measurement is performed using events with exactly one isolated electron or muon candidate and at least four jets. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 174 nb^{-1}. The significance of the tt[over ¯] signal against the background-only hypothesis is above 5 standard deviations. The measured cross section is σ_{tt[over ¯]}=45±8 nb, consistent with predictions from perturbative quantum chromodynamics.

On the A-dependence of the neutron single-spin asymmetry in pA-collisions

Preliminary results of the PHENIX experiment on the single-spin asymmetry (AN) for a neutron production in proton-nucleus collisions are discussed. The asymmetry AN changes its sign and increases three-fold as the transition from p + p to p + Au interactions occurs. We call this phenomena “anomalous A-dependence of AN”. This unusual behavior is explained in the framework of the chromomagnetic polarization of quarks (CPQ) model. Dependence of AN on centrality of collisions and the “ridge” effect in heavy ions collisions are discussed.

New high resolution measurements of open and hidden charm production in proton-nucleus collisions at [formula omitted] with LHCb

Open and hidden charm production in nucleus-nucleus collisions is considered as a key probe of Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) formation. In the search of specific QGP effects, proton-nucleus collisions are used as the reference as they account for the corresponding Cold Nuclear Matter (CNM) effects. The LHCb experiment, thanks to its System for Measuring Overlap with Gas (SMOG) can be operated in a fixed target mode with the LHC beams, at an intermediate center-of-mass energy between nominal SPS and RHIC energies. In 2015, for the first time, reactions of incident LHC proton beams on noble gas targets have been recorded by the LHCb experiment at a center-of-mass energy of 110 GeV and within the center-of-mass rapidity range −2.77<y⁎<−0.2. The first high resolution measurements on open and hidden charm production obtained under these conditions are presented.

Particle production in pA collisions beyond leading order

We describe the origin of, and the solution to, the negativity problem which occurs in the perturbative calculation of the cross-section for single-inclusive particle production in proton-nucleus collisions at next-to-leading-order.