arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Stephane Munier.
We develop a picture of dipole-nucleus (namely dilute-dense) and dipole-dipole (dilute-dilute) scattering in the high-energy regime based on the analysis of the fluctuations in the quantum evolution. We emphasize the difference in the nature of the fluctuations probed in these two processes respectively, which, interestingly enough, leads to observable differences in the scattering amplitude profiles.
The concepts and methods used for the study of disordered systems have proven useful in the analysis of the evolution equations of quantum chromodynamics in the high-energy regime: Indeed, parton branching in the semi-classical approximation relevant at high energies is a peculiar branching-diffusion process, and parton branching supplemented by saturation effects (such as gluon recombination) is a reaction-diffusion process. In these lectures, we first introduce the basic concepts in the context of simple toy models, we study the properties of the latter, and show how the results obtained for the simple models may be taken over to quantum chromodynamics.
Parton evolution with the rapidity essentially is a branching diffusion process. We describe the fluctuations of the density of partons which affect the properties of QCD scattering amplitudes at moderately high energies. We arrive at different functional forms of the latter in the case of dipole-nucleus and dipole-dipole scattering.
Perturbative QCD is the appropriate tool to describe many important properties of the inclusive observables measured at electron-proton (or ion) colliders, such as the energy dependence of the total cross sections in well-chosen kinematical regions. This is because the electron may effectively be replaced by its cloud of photons, whose virtualities provide a hard scale that enables perturbative expansions. At hadron colliders instead, there is no hard scale in the initial state. Therefore, the observables one may compute perturbatively involve the production of jets, and thus belong to a quite different class of observables. However, it turns out that there is a formal relation between production processes and total cross sections, enabling one to apply calculations of the latter to the former. We review this relation, and present our recent proof that it holds at next-to-leading order (in the BFKL sense).