Mutual boosting of the saturation scales in colliding nuclei

Abstract

Saturation of small-x gluons in a nucleus, which has the form of transverse momentum broadening of projectile gluons in pA collisions in the nuclear rest frame, leads to a modification of the parton distribution functions in the beam compared with pp collisions. The DGLAP driven gluon distribution turns out to be suppressed at large x, but significantly enhanced at x<<1. This is a high twist effect. In the case of nucleus-nucleus collisions all participating nucleons on both sides get enriched in gluon density at small x, which leads to a further boosting of the saturation scale. We derive reciprocity equations for the saturation scales corresponding to a collision of two nuclei. The solution of these equations for central collisions of two heavy nuclei demonstrate a significant, up to several times, enhancement of Q_{sA}^2, in AA compared with pA collisions.

Comments: 12 pages, 4 figures. Extended version to be published in Phys. Lett. B