Nuclear scattering configurations of onia in different frames

Abstract

In the scattering of a small onium off a large nucleus at high center-of-mass energies, when the parameters are set in such a way that the cross section at fixed impact parameter is small, events are triggered by rare partonic fluctuations of the onium, which are very deformed with respect to typical configurations. Using the color dipole picture of high-energy interactions in quantum chromodynamics, in which the quantum states of the onium are represented by sets of dipoles generated by a branching process, we describe the typical scattering configurations as seen from different reference frames, from the restframe of the nucleus to frames in which the rapidity is shared between the projectile onium and the nucleus. We show that taking advantage of the freedom to select a frame in the latter class makes possible to derive complete asymptotic expressions for some boost-invariant quantities, beyond the total cross section, from a procedure which leverages the limited available knowledge on the properties of the solutions to the Balitsky-Kovchegov equation that governs the rapidity-dependence of total cross sections. We obtain in this way an analytic expression for the rapidity-distribution of the first branching of the slowest parent dipole of the set of those which scatter. This distribution provides an estimator of the correlations of the interacting dipoles, and is also known to be related to the rapidity-gap distribution in diffractive dissociation, an observable measurable at a future electron-ion collider. Furthermore, our result may be formulated as a more general conjecture, that we expect to hold true for any one-dimensional branching random walk model, on the branching time of the most recent common ancestor of all the particles that end up to the right of a given position.