Pictures of Particle Production in Proton-Nucleus Collisions

Abstract

This work focuses on gluon(jet) production in dilute(proton)-dense(nucleus) collisions. Depending on the frame and gauge, gluon production can be viewed as a freeing of gluons coming from either the proton wave function or from the nucleus wave function. These (apparently) very different pictures must lead to the same result and the purpose of this paper is to see how that happens. The focus is on gluons having $k_{\perp }\sim Q_S$ or gluons in the scaling region $k_{\perp }/Q_S\gg 1$. In the McLerran-Venugopalan(MV) model with $k_{\perp }\sim Q_S$ we are able to derive gluon production in a way that (graphically) manifestly shows $k_{\perp }$-factorization in terms of the number density of gluons in the nuclear wave function. We presume that this picture, and $k_{\perp }$-factorization, continues to hold in the presence of small-$x$ evolution although we have not been able to explicitly verify this. Our result is in agreement with usual $k_{\perp }$-factorization where the gluon number density of the nucleus does not appear in an explicit way.

Comments: 10 pages, 4 figures. Dedicated to Andrzej Bialas in honor of his 80th birthday