Single inclusive forward hadron production at next-to-leading order

Abstract

We discuss single inclusive hadron production from a high energy quark scattering off a strong target color field in the Color Glass Condensate formalism. Recent calculations of this process at the next-to-leading order accuracy have led to negative cross sections at large transverse momenta. We identify the origin of this problem as an oversubtraction of the rapidity divergence into the Balitsky-Kovchegov evolution equation for the target. We propose a new way to implement the kinematical restriction on the emitted gluons to overcome this difficulty.

Comments: 12 pages, 9 figures. v2: matches published version