No Arabic abstract
A detailed reanalysis of the single gluon emission rate at next-to-leading twist is carried out. As was the case in prior efforts, the problem is cast in the framework of deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) of an electron off a large nucleus. The quark produced in the interaction propagates through the remaining nucleus and engenders scattering and gluon radiation, which is calculated in the limit of one re-scattering. This medium induced single gluon emission rate forms the basis of several energy loss calculations in both DIS and heavy-ion collisions. Unlike prior efforts, a complete transverse momentum gradient expansion of the hadronic tensor, including $N_c$ suppressed terms, phase terms and finite gluon momentum fraction terms, ignored previously, is carried out. These terms turn out to be surprisingly large. In contrast to prior efforts, the full next-to-leading twist gluon emission kernel is found to be positive definite and slowly increasing with the exchanged transverse momentum. Phenomenological consequences of these new contributions are discussed.
We compute the cross section for photons emitted from sea quarks in proton-nucleus collisions at collider energies. The computation is performed within the dilute-dense kinematics of the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) effective field theory. Albeit the result obtained is formally at next-to-leading order in the CGC power counting, it provides the dominant contribution for central rapidities. We observe that the inclusive photon cross section is proportional to all-twist Wilson line correlators in the nucleus. These correlators also appear in quark-pair production; unlike the latter, photon production is insensitive to hadronization uncertainties and therefore more sensitive to multi-parton correlations in the gluon saturation regime of QCD. We demonstrate that $k_perp$ and collinear factorized expressions for inclusive photon production are obtained as leading twist approximations to our result. In particular, the collinearly factorized expression is directly sensitive to the nuclear gluon distribution at small $x$. Other results of interest include the realization of the Low-Burnett-Kroll soft photon theorem in the CGC framework and a comparative study of how the photon amplitude is obtained in Lorenz and light-cone gauges.
We propose a new jet algorithm for deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) that accounts for the forward-backward asymmetry in the Breit frame. The Centauro algorithm is longitudinally invariant and can cluster jets with Born kinematics, which enables novel studies of transverse-momentum-dependent observables. Furthermore, we show that spherically-invariant algorithms in the Breit frame give access to low-energy jets from current fragmentation. We propose novel studies in unpolarized, polarized, and nuclear DIS at the future Electron-Ion Collider.
We provide a first calculation of the complete next-to-leading order QCD corrections for heavy flavor contributions to the inclusive structure function $g_1$ in longitudinally polarized deep-inelastic scattering. The results are derived with largely analytical methods and retain the full dependence on the heavy quarks mass. We discuss all relevant technical details of the calculation and present numerical results for the heavy quark scaling functions. We perform important crosschecks to verify our results in the known limit of photoproduction and for the unpolarized electroproduction of heavy quarks. We also compare our calculations to the available, partial results in the polarized case, in particular, in the limit of asymptotically large photon virtualities, and analyze the behavior of the scaling functions near threshold. First steps towards phenomenological applications are taken by providing some estimates for inclusive charm production in polarized deep-inelastic scattering at a future electron-ion collider and studying their sensitivity to the polarized gluon distribution. The residual dependence of heavy quark electroproduction on unphysical factorization and renormalization scales and on the heavy quark mass is investigated.
We report on a recently completed, first calculation of the full next-to-leading order QCD corrections for heavy flavor contributions to the inclusive structure function $g_1$ in longitudinally polarized deep-inelastic scattering. All results are derived with largely analytical methods and retain the full dependence on the heavy quarks mass. As a first phenomenological application, inclusive charm production at a future electron-ion collider and its sensitivity to the polarized gluon distribution is studied. Theoretical uncertainties due to the residual dependence on unphysical factorization and renormalization scales are estimated.
We present the first calculation at next-to-leading order (NLO) in $alpha_s$ of a fragmentation function into quarkonium whose form at leading order is a nontrivial function of $z$, namely the fragmentation function for a gluon into a spin-singlet S-wave state at leading order in the relative velocity. To calculate the real NLO corrections, we introduce a new subtraction scheme that allows the phase-space integrals to be evaluated in 4 dimensions. We extract all ultraviolet and infrared divergences in the real NLO corrections analytically by calculating the phase-space integrals of the subtraction terms in $4-2epsilon$ dimensions. We also extract the divergences in the virtual NLO corrections analytically, and detail the cancellation of all divergences after renormalization. The NLO corrections have a dramatic effect on the shape of the fragmentation function, and they significantly increase the fragmentation probability.