Charged particle multiplicities in pA interactions at the LHC from the Color Glass Condensate

Abstract

The forthcoming LHC measurement of hadron multiplicity in proton-nucleus collisions is a crucial test of the k_t factorization and gluon saturation based models. Here, we provide quantitative predictions for the pseudorapidity distribution of charged particles produced in minimum bias proton-nucleus collisions at the LHC based on the idea of gluon saturation in the color-glass condensate framework. Our formulation gives good descriptions of the LHC and RHIC data for the charged-hadron multiplicities in both proton-proton and nucleus-nucleus collisions, and also the deep inelastic scattering at HERA at small Bjorken-x.

Comments: 5 pages, 3 figures; v2: version improved. The version to appear in PRD