Relating the description of gluon production in pA collisions and parton energy loss in AA collisions

Abstract

We calculate the classical gluon field of a fast projectile passing through a dense medium. We show that this allows us to calculate both the initial state gluon production in proton-nucleus collisions and the final state gluon radiation off a hard parton produced in nucleus-nucleus collisions. This unified description of these two phenomena makes the relation between the saturation scale $Q_s$ and the transport coefficient $\hat{q}$ more transparent. Also, we discuss the validity of the eikonal approximation for gluon propagation inside the nucleus in proton-nucleus collisions at RHIC energy.

Comments: 18 pages, 3 figures