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R. Venugopalan

Publications and source records attributed to R. Venugopalan.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2011

Gluons and the quark sea at high energies: distributions, polarization, tomography

This report is based on a ten-week program on "Gluons and the quark sea at high-energies", which took place at the Institute for Nuclear Theory in Seattle in Fall 2010. The principal aim of the program was to develop and sharpen the science case for an Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a facility that will be able to collide electrons and positrons with polarized protons and with light to heavy nuclei at high energies, offering unprecedented possibilities for in-depth studies of quantum chromodynamics. This report is organized around four major themes: i) the spin and flavor structure of the proton, ii) three-dimensional structure of nucleons and nuclei in momentum and configuration space, iii) QCD matter in nuclei, and iv) Electroweak physics and the search for physics beyond the Standard Model. Beginning with an executive summary, the report contains tables of key measurements, chapter overviews for each of the major scientific themes, and detailed individual contributions on various aspects of the scientific opportunities presented by an EIC.

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arXiv2010

Role of quantum fluctuations in a system with strong fields: Onset of hydrodynamical flow

Quantum fluctuations are believed to play an important role in the thermalization of classical fields in inflationary cosmology but their relevance for isotropization/thermalization of the classical fields produced in heavy ion collisions is not completely understood. We consider a scalar $ϕ^4$ toy model coupled to a strong external source, like in the Color Glass Condensate description of the early time dynamics of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions. The leading order classical evolution of the scalar fields is significantly modified by the rapid growth of time-dependent quantum fluctuations, necessitating an all order resummation of such "secular" terms. We show that the resummed expressions cause the system to evolve in accordance with ideal hydrodynamics. We comment briefly on the thermalization of our quantum system and the extension of our results to a gauge theory.

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arXiv2010

Non-perturbative computation of double inclusive gluon production in the Glasma

The near-side ridge observed in A+A collisions at RHIC has been described as arising from the radial flow of Glasma flux tubes formed at very early times in the collisions. We investigate the viability of this scenario by performing a non-perturbative numerical computation of double inclusive gluon production in the Glasma. Our results support the conjecture that the range of transverse color screening of correlations determining the size of the flux tubes is a semi-hard scale, albeit with non-trivial structure. We discuss our results in the context of ridge correlations in the RHIC heavy ion experiments.

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arXiv2010

The Color Glass Condensate

We provide a broad overview of the theoretical status and phenomenological applications of the Color Glass Condensate effective field theory describing universal properties of saturated gluons in hadron wavefunctions that are extracted from deeply inelastic scattering and hadron-hadron collision experiments at high energies.

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arXiv2009

Long range two-particle rapidity correlations in A+A collisions from high energy QCD evolution

Long range rapidity correlations in A+A collisions are sensitive to strong color field dynamics at early times after the collision. These can be computed in a factorization formalism \cite{GelisLV5} which expresses the $n$-gluon inclusive spectrum at arbitrary rapidity separations in terms of the multi-parton correlations in the nuclear wavefunctions. This formalism includes all radiative and rescattering contributions, to leading accuracy in $α_sΔY$, where $ΔY$ is the rapidity separation between either one of the measured gluons and a projectile, or between the measured gluons themselves. In this paper, we use a mean field approximation for the evolution of the nuclear wavefunctions to obtain a compact result for inclusive two gluon correlations in terms of the unintegrated gluon distributions in the nuclear projectiles. The unintegrated gluon distributions satisfy the Balitsky-Kovchegov equation, which we solve with running coupling and with initial conditions constrained by existing data on electron-nucleus collisions. Our results are valid for arbitrary rapidity separations between measured gluons having transverse momenta $p_\perp,q_\perp\gtrsim \qs$, where $\qs$ is the saturation scale in the nuclear wavefunctions. We compare our results to data on long range rapidity correlations observed in the near-side ridge at RHIC and make predictions for similar long range rapidity correlations at the LHC.

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arXiv2009

Diffractive structure functions in nuclei

We calculate proton and nuclear diffractive structure functions in the IPsat (Kowalski-Teaney) dipole model. This parametrization has previously been shown to provide good agreement with inclusive F_2 measurements and exclusive vector meson measurements at HERA. We discuss how the impact parameter dependence crucially affects our analysis, in particular for small beta.

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arXiv2009

High energy factorization in nucleus-nucleus collisions III. Long range rapidity correlations

We obtain a novel result in QCD for long range rapidity correlations between gluons produced in the collision of saturated high energy hadrons or nuclei. This result, obtained in a high energy factorization framework, provides strong justification for the Glasma flux tube picture of coherent strong color fields. Our formalism can be applied to "near side ridge" events at RHIC and in future studies of long range rapidity correlations at the LHC.

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arXiv2008

The glasma initial state and JIMWLK factorization

We review recent work on understanding the next to leading order corrections to the classical fields that dominate the initial stages of a heavy ion collision. We have recently shown that the leading ln(1/x) divergences of these corrections to gluon multiplicities can be factorized into the JIMWLK evolution of the color charge density distributions.

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arXiv2008

Nuclear enhancement and suppression of diffractive structure functions at high energies

We compute diffractive structure functions for both protons and nuclei in the framework of Color Glass Condensate models with impact parameter dependence. These models have previously been shown to provide good agreement with inclusive F_2 measurements and exclusive vector meson measurements at HERA. For nuclei, they provide good (parameter free) agreement with the inclusive F_2 data. We demonstrate good agreement of our computations with HERA measurements on inclusive diffraction. We extend our analysis to nuclei and predict the pattern of enhancement and suppression of the diffractive structures functions that can be measured at an Electron Ion Collider. We discuss how the impact parameter dependence crucially affects our analysis, in particular for large invariant masses at fixed Q^2.

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arXiv2008

High energy factorization in nucleus-nucleus collisions II - Multigluon correlations

We extend previous results (arXiv:0804.2630 [hep-ph]) on factorization in high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions by computing the inclusive multigluon spectrum to next-to-leading order. The factorization formula is strictly valid for multigluon emission in a slice of rapidity of width ΔY< 1/α_s. Our results show that often neglected disconnected graphs dominate the inclusive multigluon spectrum and are essential to prove factorization for this quantity. These results provide a dynamical framework for the Glasma flux tube picture of the striking "ridge"-like correlation seen in heavy ion collisions.

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arXiv2008

Nuclear diffractive structure functions at high energies

A future high-energy electron-ion collider would explore the non-linear weakly-coupled regime of QCD, and test the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) approach to high-energy scattering. Hard diffraction in deep inelastic scattering off nuclei will provide many fundamental measurements. In this work, the nuclear diffractive structure function F_{2,A}^D is predicted in the CGC framework, and the features of nuclear enhancement and suppression are discussed.

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arXiv2008

Nuclear enhancement of universal dynamics of high parton densities

We show that the enhancement of the saturation scale in large nuclei relative to the proton is significantly influenced by the effects of quantum evolution and the impact parameter dependence of dipole cross sections in high energy QCD. We demonstrate that there is a strong A dependence in diffractive deeply inelastic scattering and discuss its sensitivity to the measurement of the recoil nucleus.

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arXiv2007

How particles emerge from decaying classical fields in heavy ion collisions: towards a kinetic description of the Glasma

We develop the formalism discussed previously in hep-ph/0601209 and hep-ph/0605246 to construct a kinetic theory that provides insight into the earliest ``Glasma'' stage of a high energy heavy ion collision. Particles produced from the decay of classical fields in the Glasma obey a Boltzmann equation whose novel features include an inhomogeneous source term and new contributions to the collision term. We discuss the power counting associated with the different terms in the Boltzmann equation and outline the transition from the field dominated regime to the particle dominated regime in high energy heavy ion collisions.

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arXiv2007

Heavy flavor production in pA collisions

Heavy quark production in high-energy proton-nucleus (pA) collisions is described in the framework of the Color Glass Condensate. kT factorization is broken even at leading order albeit a more general factorization in pA holds at this order in terms of 2, 3 and 4 point correlators of Wilson lines in the nuclear target. The x-evolution of these correlators is computed in the large A and large N mean field limit of the Balitsky-Kovchegov equation. We show results for heavy quark production at RHIC and LHC energies.

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arXiv2006

Universality of the saturation scale and the initial eccentricity in heavy ion collisions

Recent estimates that Color Glass Condensate initial conditions may generate a larger initial eccentricity for noncentral relativistic heavy ion collisions (relative to the initial eccentricity assumed in earlier hydrodynamic calculations) have raised the possibility of a higher bound on the viscosity of the Quark Gluon Plasma. We show that this large initial eccentricity results in part from a definition of the saturation scale as proportional to the number of nucleons participating in the collision. A saturation scale proportional to the nuclear thickness function (and therefore independent of the probe) leads to a smaller eccentricity, albeit still larger than the value used in hydrodynamic models. Our results suggest that the early elliptic flow in heavy ion collisions (unlike multiplicity distributions) is sensitive to the universality of the saturation scale in high energy QCD.

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arXiv2006

Particle production in field theories coupled to strong external sources I. Formalism and main results

We develop a formalism for particle production in a field theory coupled to a strong time-dependent external source. An example of such a theory is the Color Glass Condensate. We derive a formula, in terms of cut vacuum-vacuum Feynman graphs, for the probability of producing a given number of particles. This formula is valid to all orders in the coupling constant. The distribution of multiplicities is non--Poissonian, even in the classical approximation. We investigate an alternative method of calculating the mean multiplicity. At leading order, the average multiplicity can be expressed in terms of retarded solutions of classical equations of motion. We demonstrate that the average multiplicity at {\it next-to-leading order} can be formulated as an initial value problem by solving equations of motion for small fluctuation fields with retarded boundary conditions. The variance of the distribution can be calculated in a similar fashion. Our formalism therefore provides a framework to compute from first principles particle production in proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions beyond leading order in the coupling constant and to all orders in the source density. We also provide a transparent interpretation (in conventional field theory language) of the well known Abramovsky-Gribov-Kancheli (AGK) cancellations. Explicit connections are made between the framework for multi-particle production developed here and the framework of Reggeon field theory.

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