Proton breakup in high-energy pA collisions from perturbative QCD.
We argue that the distribution of hadrons near the longitudinal light cone in central high-energy pA collisions is computable in weak coupling QCD. This is because the density of gluons per unit transverse area in the dense target at saturation provides an intrinsic semihard momentum scale, Q(s). We predict that the longitudinal distribution of (anti)baryons and mesons steepens with increasing energy and atomic number of the target and that the transverse momentum distribution broadens. We show that the evolution of high moments of the longitudinal net baryon distribution with Q(s) is determined by the anomalous dimension gamma(qq).
Dumitru
A
A
Physics Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973, USA.
Gerland
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L
Strikman
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M