Recursion relations and scattering amplitudes in the light-front formalism

The fragmentation functions and scattering amplitudes are investigated in the framework of light-front perturbation theory. It is demonstrated that, the factorization property of the fragmentation functions implies the recursion relations for the off-shell scattering amplitudes which are light-front analogs of the Berends-Giele relations. These recursion relations on the light-front can be solved exactly by induction and it is shown that the expressions for the off-shell light-front amplitudes are represented as a linear combinations of the on-shell amplitudes. By putting external particles on-shell we recover the scattering amplitudes previously derived in the literature.

Drell-Yan process at forward rapidity at the LHC

We analyze the Drell-Yan lepton pair production at forward rapidity at the Large Hadron Collider. Using the dipole framework for the computation of the cross section we find a significant suppression in comparison to the collinear factorization formula due to saturation effects in the dipole cross section. We develop a twist expansion in powers of Q_s^2/M^2 where Q_s is the saturation scale and M the invariant mass of the produced lepton pair. For the nominal LHC energy the leading twist description is sufficient down to masses of 6 GeV. Below that value the higher twist terms give a significant contribution.