Novel High Transverse Momentum Phenomena in Hadronic and Nuclear Collisions

Abstract

I discuss a number of novel phenomenological features of QCD in high transverse momentum reactions. The presence of direct higher-twist processes, where a proton is produced directly in the hard subprocess, can explain the "baryon anomaly" -- the large proton-to-pion ratio seen at RHIC in high centrality heavy ion collisions. Direct hadronic processes can also account for the deviation from leading-twist PQCD scaling at fixed x_T = 2p_T/\sqrt s. I suggest that the "ridge" -- the same-side long-range rapidity correlation observed at RHIC in high centrality heavy ion collisions is due to the imprint of semihard DGLAP gluon radiation from initial-state partons which have transverse momenta biased toward the trigger. Rescattering interactions from gluon-exchange, normally neglected in the parton model, have a profound effect in QCD hard-scattering reactions, leading to leading-twist single-spin asymmetries, diffractive deep inelastic scattering, diffractive hard hadronic reactions, the breakdown of the Lam-Tung relation in Drell-Yan reactions, nuclear shadowing --all leading-twist dynamics not incorporated in the light-front wavefunctions of the target computed in isolation. Antishadowing is shown to be quark flavor specific and thus different in charged and neutral deep inelastic lepton-nucleus scattering. I also discuss the consequences of color-octet intrinsic heavy quark distributions in the proton for heavy particle and Higgs production at high x_F. The AdS/CFT correspondence between Anti-de Sitter space and conformal gauge theories allows one to compute the analytic form of frame-independent light-front wavefunctions of mesons and baryons and to compute quark and gluon hadronization at the amplitude level.