Gluon saturation effects at forward rapidities at LHC in pp collisions

Abstract

We investigate hadrons and direct photon production in pp collisions at the LHC energy within the color-dipole approach. We show that greatest sensitivity to gluon saturation effects is reached at very forward rapidities in pp collisions at LHC (\sqrt{s}=14 TeV). The discrepancies among various saturation models (fitted to HERA data) results can be about a factor of 2-3 at forward rapidities. We found that the ratio of direct-photon to pion production can be about 20-10 at forward rapidities \eta=7-8. Therefore, direct photon production at forward rapidities should provide a rather clean probe as the background from radiative hadronic decays is significantly suppressed.