Dijet production as a centrality trigger for p-p collisions at CERN LHC

Abstract

We demonstrate that a trigger on hard dijet production at small rapidities allows to establish a quantitative distinction between central and peripheral collisions in pbar-p and p-p collisions at Tevatron and LHC energies. Such a trigger strongly reduces the effective impact parameters as compared to minimum bias events. This happens because the transverse spatial distribution of hard partons (x >~ 10^{-2}) in the proton is considerably narrower than that of soft partons, whose collisions dominate the total cross section. In the central collisions selected by the trigger, most of the partons with x >~ 10^{-2} interact with a gluon field whose strength rapidly increases with energy. At LHC (and to some extent already at Tevatron) energies the strength of this interaction approaches the unitarity ('black-body') limit. This leads to specific modifications of the final state, such as a higher probability of multijet events at small rapidities, a strong increase of the transverse momenta and depletion of the longitudinal momenta at large rapidities, and the appearance of long-range correlations in rapidity between the forward/backward fragmentation regions. The same pattern is expected for events with production of new heavy particles (Higgs, SUSY). Studies of these phenomena would be feasible with the CMS-TOTEM detector setup, and would have considerable impact on the exploration of the physics of strong gluon fields in QCD, as well as the search for new particles at LHC.Comment: 17 pages, Revtex 4, 14 EPS figures. Expanded discussion of some points, added 3 new figures and new references. Included comment on connection with cosmic ray physics near the GZK cutoff. To appear in Phys Rev