Phenomenology of high gluon density QCD and heavy-ion physics at ISMD 2011: x smaller than ever !

Abstract

I provide a brief summary of the theory presentations at ISMD 2011 related to the phenomenology of small-x QCD evolution and its application to particle production and fluctuations in high-energy hadron and heavy-ion collisions. I also mention some challenges for quantitative phenomenology which emerged from the LHC, such as understanding the long-range "ridge" in high-multiplicity p+p collisions, the transverse momentum distributions in p+p at semi-hard pT, and the origin and scale of density fluctuations in the initial state of heavy-ion collisions.

Comments: 10 pages; contribution to proceedings of ISMD 2011, Sept. 26-30, Miyajima Island, Hiroshima; v2: minor modifications to the text, added two references; to be published in Progr. Theor. Phys. Suppl