Production of Forward Rapidity Photons in High Energy Heavy Ion Collisions

We consider production of prompt photons in high energy gold-gold and deuteron-gold collisions in the forward rapidity region of RHIC ($y \sim 3.8$). In this kinematics, the projectile partons typically have large $x_{bj}$ while the target partons are mostly at very small $x_{bj}$ so that the primary partonic collisions involve valence quarks from the projectile and gluons from the target. We take the target nucleus to be a Color Glass Condensate while the projectile deuteron or nucleus is treated as a dilute system of partons. We show that the photon production cross section can be written as a convolution of a quark-nucleus scattering cross section, involving a quark anti-quark dipole, with the Leading Order quark-photon fragmentation function. We consider different models of the quark anti-quark dipole and show that measurement of photons in the forward rapidity region at RHIC can distinguish between different parameterizations of the dipole cross section as well as help clarify the role of parton coalescence models in hadron production at RHIC.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

Non-global jet evolution at finite N_c

Resummations of soft gluon emissions play an important role in many applications of QCD, among them jet observables and small x saturation effects. Banfi, Marchesini, and Smye have derived an evolution equation for non-global jet observables that exhibits a remarkable analogy with the BK equation used in the small x context. Here, this analogy is used to generalize the former beyond the leading N_c approximation. The result shows striking analogy with the JIMWLK equation describing the small x evolution of the color glass condensate. A Langevin description allows numerical implementation and provides clues for the formulation of closed forms for amplitudes at finite N_c. The proof of the new equation is based on these amplitudes with ordered soft emission. It is fully independent of the derivation of the JIMWLK equation and thus sheds new light also on this topic.Comment: 22 page

Rapidity dependence of the photon to pion production ratio in high energy collisions

We investigate rapidity dependence of the ratio of photon and pion production cross sections in high energy proton (deuteron) - nucleus collisions at RHIC and LHC. This ratio, and its rapidity dependence can be a sensitive probe of high density QCD (Color Glass Condensate) dynamics and shed further light on the role of saturation physics at RHIC and LHC.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

Two-hadron correlations in the Color Glass Condensate formalism

Two-hadron correlations are a sensitive probe of the dynamics of gluon saturation and the Color Glass Condensate formalism where the degrees of freedom are Wilson lines of the gluon field. It is shown that unlike structure functions in DIS and single hadron production in proton-nucleus collisions, higher point functions of Wilson lines appear in two-hadron production cross section. We derive equations for the energy ($x$) evolution of these higher point functions using the JIMWLK Hamiltonian and show that dipole approximation, employed in the literature to fit the di-hadron data measured by the STAR collaboration in the forward rapidity region, breaks down. This necessitates an investigation of the full hierarchy of the JIMWLK evolution equations for these higher point functions and their solutions. This can then be used to make a quantitative analysis of the di-hadron correlations in the forward rapidity region in deuteron-gold collisions at RHIC and in the long range rapidity correlations observed in proton-proton collisions at the LHC.Comment: 10 pages, based on talks given by the author in in the program "High Energy Strong Interactions 2010" at the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, July-August 2010, Kyoto, Japan and in the "5th International Workshop on high $p_t$ Physics at LHC 2010", September - October, 2010, Mexico City, Mexic