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I. K. Potashnikova

Publications and source records attributed to I. K. Potashnikova.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2014

Nuclear Glory Phenomenon

Analytical explanation of the nuclear glory effect, which is similar to the known optical (atmospheric) glory phenomenon, is presented. It is based on the small phase space method for the multiple interaction processes probability estimates and leads to the characteristic angular dependence of the production cross section $dσ\sim 1/ \sqrt {π- θ}$ in the vicinity of the strictly backward direction, for any number of interactions $N\geq 3$, either elastic or inelastic. Rigorous proof of this effect is given for the case of the optimal kinematics, as well as for arbitrary polar scattering angles in the case of the light particle rescattering, but the arguments in favor of the backward azimuthal (axial) focusing are quite general and hold for any kind of the multiple interaction processes. Such behaviour of the cross section near the backward direction agrees qualitatively with available data. In the small interval of final angles including the value $θ=π$ the angular dependence of the cumulative particle production cross section can have the crater-like (or funnel-like) form. Further studies including, probably, certain numerical calculations, are necessary to clear up this point.

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arXiv2014

Survival of charmonia in a hot environment

A colorless c-cbar dipole emerging from a heavy ion collision and developing the charmonium wave function can be broken-up by final state interactions (FSI) propagating through the hot medium created in the collision. We single out two mechanisms of charmonium attenuation: (i) Debye color screening, called melting; and (ii) color-exchange interaction with the medium, called absorption. The former problem has been treated so far only for charmonia at rest embedded in the medium, while in practice their transverse momenta at the LHC are quite high, =7-10 GeV^2. We demonstrate that a c-cbar dipole may have a large survival probability even at infinitely high temperature. We develop a procedure of Lorentz boosting of the Schroedinger equation to a moving reference frame and perform the first realistic calculations of the charmonium survival probability employing the path-integral technique, incorporating both melting and absorption. These effects are found to have comparable magnitudes. We also calculated the FSI suppression factor for the radial excitation psi(2S) and found it to be stronger than for J/psi, except large p_T, where psi(2S) is relatively enhanced. The azimuthal asymmetry parameter v_2 is also calculated.

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arXiv2014

Charmonium in a hot medium: melting vs absorption

A charmonium produced in heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC propagates through a dense co-moving matter with a rather high relative momentum, =4-10GeV^2. In spite of Debye screening of the binding potential, the charmonium survives with a substantial probability, even if the c-cbar potential is completely screened in the hot environment. In addition, the color-exchange interaction with the medium is another important source of charmonium suppression. Attenuation in a hot medium caused by both effects is evaluated by means of the path integral technique, which requires ability of boosting the binding potential to a moving reference frame. This problem is solved in the approximation of small intrinsic velocities of the charmed quarks.

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arXiv2014

Quenching of high-pT hadrons: a non-energy-loss scenario

A parton produced with a high transverse momentum in a hard collision is regenerating its color field, intensively radiating gluons and losing energy. This process cannot last long, if it ends up with production of a leading hadron carrying the main fraction z_h of the initial parton momentum. So energy conservation imposes severe constraints on the length scale of production of a single hadron with high pT. As a result, the main reason for hadron quenching observed in heavy ion collisions, is not energy loss, but attenuation of the produced colorless dipole in the created dense medium. The latter mechanism, calculated with the path-integral method, explains well the observed suppression of light hadrons and the elliptic flow in a wide range of energies, from the lowest energy of RHIC up to LHC, and in a wide range of transverse momenta. The values of the transport coefficient extracted from data range within 1-2 GeV^2/fm, dependent on energy, and agree well with the theoretical expectations.

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arXiv2013

High-pT hadrons from nuclear collisions: Unifying pQCD with hydrodynamics

Hadrons inclusively produced with large pT in high-energy collisions originate from the jets, whose initial virtuality and energy are of the same order, what leads to an extremely intensive gluon radiation and dissipation of energy at the early stage of hadronization. Besides, these jets have a peculiar structure: the main fraction of the jet energy is carried by a single leading hadron, so such jets are very rare. The constraints imposed by energy conservation enforce an early color neutralization and a cease of gluon radiation. The produced colorless dipole does not dissipate energy anymore and is evolving to form the hadron wave function. The small and medium pT region is dominated by the hydrodynamic mechanisms of hadron production from the created hot medium. The abrupt transition between the hydrodynamic and perturbative QCD mechanisms causes distinct minima in the pT dependence of the suppression factor R_{AA} and of the azimuthal asymmetry v2. Combination of these mechanisms allows to describe the data through the full range of pT at different collision energies and centralities.

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arXiv2013

J/Psi in high-multiplicity pp collisions: lessons from pA

Gluons at small x in high-energy nuclei overlap in the longitudinal direction, so the nucleus acts as a single source of gluons, like higher Fock components in a single nucleon, which contribute to inelastic collisions with a high multiplicity of produced hadrons. This similarity helps to make a link between nuclear effects in pA and high-multiplicity pp collisions. Such a relation is well confirmed by data for the J/Psi production rate in high-multiplicity pp events measured recently in the ALICE experiment. Broadening of J/Psi transverse momentum is predicted for high-multiplicity pp collisions.

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arXiv2012

J/Psi production off nuclei: a detour from SPS to LHC

We present a collection of selected phenomena observed in J/Psi production from proton-nucleus and heavy ion collisions at energies, ranging between the SPS and LHC. The emphasis is placed on the related theoretical ideas or techniques, which are either not widely known, or offer an alternative explanation to the observed nuclear effects.

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arXiv2012

Incurable Adler relation for soft neutrino interactions

The Adler relation (AR), which bridges soft interactions of neutrinos and pions, might look as a manifestation of pion dominance. However neutrino cannot fluctuate to a pion because of lepton current conservation, instead it interacts via much heavier hadronic components. This fact leads to nontrivial relations between interaction amplitudes of different hadronic species, in particular, it links diagonal and off-diagonal diffractive interactions of pions. Absorptive corrections break these relations making the AR impossible to hold universally, i.e. for any target and at any energy. We predict a dramatic breakdown of the AR for coherent neutrino-production of pions on nuclei at all energies.

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arXiv2012

Quenching of high-pT hadrons: Energy Loss vs Color Transparency

High-pT hadrons produced in hard collisions and detected inclusively bear peculiar features: (i) they originate from jets whose initial virtuality and energy are of the same order; (ii) such jets are rare and have a very biased energy sharing among the particles, namely, the detected hadron carries the main fraction of the jet energy. The former feature leads to an extremely intensive gluon radiation and energy dissipation at the early stage of hadronization, either in vacuum or in a medium. As a result, a leading hadron must be produced on a short length scale. Evaluation within a model of perturbative fragmentation confirms the shortness of the production length. This result is at variance with the unjustified assumption of long production length, made within the popular energy loss scenario. Thus we conclude that the main reason of suppression of high-pT hadrons in heavy ion collisions is the controlled by color transparency attenuation of a high-pT dipole propagating through the hot medium. Adjusting a single parameter, the transport coefficient, we describe quite well the data from LHC and RHIC for the suppression factor R_{AA} as function of pT, collision energy and centrality. We observe that the complementary effect of initial state interaction causes a flattening and even fall of R_{AA} at large pT. The azimuthal anisotropy of hadron production, calculated with no further adjustment, also agrees well with data at different energies and centralities.

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arXiv2012

Pion structure function at small x from DIS data

Production of leading neutrons in DIS is usually considered as a tool to measure the pion structure function at small x accessible at HERA. The main obstacle is the lack of reliable evaluations of the absorption corrections, which significantly suppress the cross section. We performed a parameter free calculation within the dipole approach and found the absorption corrections to be nearly as strong, as for neutron production in pp collisions. We also included the significant contribution of the iso-vector Reggeons with natural (ρ, a_2) and unnatural (a_1, ρ-π cut) parity with parameters constrained by phenomenology. With a certain modeling for the pion-to-proton ratio of the structure functions we reached good agreement with data from the ZEUS and H1 experiments, successfully reproducing the observed dependence on the fractional neutron momentum z, the photon virtuality Q^2, and the transverse momentum transfer q_T.

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arXiv2011

Single transverse spin asymmetry of forward neutrons

We calculate the single transverse spin asymmetry $A_N(t)$, for inclusive neutron production in $pp$ collisions at forward rapidities relative to the polarized proton in the energy range of RHIC. Absorptive corrections to the pion pole generate a relative phase between the spin-flip and non-flip amplitudes, leading to a transverse spin asymmetry which is found to be far too small to explain the magnitude of $A_N$ observed in the PHENIX experiment. A larger contribution, which does not vanish at high energies, comes from the interference of pion and $a_1$-Reggeon exchanges. The unnatural parity of $a_1$ guarantees a substantial phase shift, although the magnitude is strongly suppressed by the smallness of diffractive $πp\to a_1 p$ cross section. We replace the Regge $a_1$ pole by the Regge cut corresponding to the $πρ$ exchange in the $1^+S$ state. The production of such a state, which we treat as an effective pole $a$, forms a narrow peak in the $3π$ invariant mass distribution in diffractive $πp$ interactions . The cross section is large, so one can assume that this state saturates the spectral function of the axial current and we can determine its coupling to nucleons via the PCAC Goldberger-Treiman relation and the second Weinberg sum rule. The numerical results of the parameter-free calculation of $A_N$ are in excellent agreement with the PHENIX data.

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arXiv2011

Number of Collisions in the Glauber Model and Beyond

The so called number of hadron-nucleus collisions n_coll(b) at impact parameter b, and its integral value N_coll, which are used to normalize the measured fractional cross section of a hard process, are calculated within the Glauber-Gribov theory including the effects of nucleon short-range correlations. The Gribov inelastic shadowing corrections are summed to all orders by employing the dipole representation. Numerical calculations are performed at the energies of the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We found that whereas the Gribov corrections generally increase the value of N_coll, the inclusion of nucleon correlations, acting in the opposite directions, decreases it by a comparable amount. The interplay of the two effects varies with the value of the impact parameter.

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arXiv2011

Breakdown of PCAC in diffractive neutrino interactions

We test the hypothesis of partially conserved axial current (PCAC) in high energy diffractive neutrino production of pions. Since the pion pole contribution to the Adler relation (AR) is forbidden by conservation of the lepton current, the heavier states, like the a_1 pole, ρ-π-cut, etc., control the lifetime of the hadronic fluctuations of the neutrino. We evaluate the deviation from the AR in diffractive neutrino-production of pions on proton and nuclear targets. At high energies, when all the relevant time scales considerably exceed the size of the target, the AR explicitly breaks down on an absorptive target, such as a heavy nucleus. In this regime, close to the black disc limit, the off-diagonal diffractive amplitudes vanish, while the diagonal one, π->π, which enters the AR, maximizes and saturates the unitarity bound. At lower energies, in the regime of short lifetime of heavy hadronic fluctuations the AR is restored, i.e. it is not altered by the nuclear effects.

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arXiv2011

Mutual boosting of the saturation scales in colliding nuclei

Saturation of small-x gluons in a nucleus, which has the form of transverse momentum broadening of projectile gluons in pA collisions in the nuclear rest frame, leads to a modification of the parton distribution functions in the beam compared with pp collisions. The DGLAP driven gluon distribution turns out to be suppressed at large x, but significantly enhanced at x<<1. This is a high twist effect. In the case of nucleus-nucleus collisions all participating nucleons on both sides get enriched in gluon density at small x, which leads to a further boosting of the saturation scale. We derive reciprocity equations for the saturation scales corresponding to a collision of two nuclei. The solution of these equations for central collisions of two heavy nuclei demonstrate a significant, up to several times, enhancement of Q_{sA}^2, in AA compared with pA collisions.

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arXiv2011

Color transparency and suppression of high-pT hadrons in nuclear collisions

The production length l_p of a leading (large z_h) hadron produced in hadronization of a highly virtual high-p_T parton is short because of the very intensive vacuum gluon radiation and dissipation of energy at the early stage of process. Therefore, the main part of nuclear suppression of high-p_T hadrons produced in heavy ion collisions is related to the survival probability of a colorless dipole propagating through a dense medium. This is subject to color transparency, which leads to a steep rise with p_T of the nuclear ratio R_{AA}(p_T), in good agreement with the recent data from the ALICE experiment at LHC, CERN. No adjustment, except the medium density is made, and the transport coefficient is found to be \hat q_0=0.8 GeV^2/fm. This is close to the value extracted from the analysis of RHIC data for J/Psi suppression, but is an order of magnitude smaller than the value found from jet quenching data within the energy loss scenario. Although the present calculations have a status of a postdiction, the mechanism and all formulas have been published, and are applied here with no modification, except the kinematics. At the same time, p_T-dependence of R_{AA} at the energy of RHIC is rather flat due to the suppression factor steeply falling with rising x_T, related to the energy conservation constraints. This factor is irrelevant to the LHC data, since x_T is much smaller.

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arXiv2010

Heavy quarkonium production: Nontrivial transition from pA to AA collisions

Two novel QCD effects, double color filtering and mutual boosting of the saturation scales in colliding nuclei, affect the transparency of the nuclei for quark dipoles in comparison with proton-nucleus collisions. The former effect increases the survival probability of the dipoles, since color filtering in one nucleus makes the other one more transparent. The second effect acts in the opposite direction and is stronger, it makes the colliding nuclei more opaque than in the case of pA collisions. As a result of parton saturation in nuclei the effective scale is shifted upwards, what leads to an increase of the gluon density at small x. This in turn leads to a stronger transverse momentum broadening in AA compared with pA collisions, i.e. to an additional growth of the saturation momentum. Such a mutual boosting leads to a system of reciprocity equations, which result in a saturation scale, a few times higher in AA than in pA collisions at the energies of LHC. Since the dipole cross section is proportional to the saturation momentum squared, the nuclei become much more opaque for dipoles in AA than in pA collisions. For the same reason gluon shadowing turns out to be boosted to a larger magnitude compared with the product of the gluon shadowing factors in each of the colliding nuclei. All these effects make it more difficult to establish a baseline for anomalous J/Psi suppression in heavy ion collisions at high energies.

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arXiv2010

J/Psi production in nuclear collisions: measuring the transport coefficient

The observed pT-dependence of nuclear effects for J/Psi produced in heavy ion collisions at RHIC might look puzzling, since the nuclear suppression seems to fade at large pT. We explain this by the interplay of three mechanisms: (i) attenuation of J/Psi in the hot medium created in the nuclear collision; (ii) initial state shadowing of charmed quarks and attenuation of a c-cbar dipole propagating through the colliding nuclei; (iii) a strong Cronin effect for J/Psi caused by saturation of gluons in the colliding nuclei. All three effects are well under control and calculated in a parameter free way, except for the transport coefficient q_0-hat characterizing the medium. This is adjusted to the J/Psi data and found to be in good agreement with the pQCD prediction, but more than an order of magnitude smaller than what was extracted from jet quenching data within the energy loss scenario.

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