Impact parameter profiles from nuclear shadowing ratio and applications to deuteron-gold collisions

Abstract

While current nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs) from global fits to experimental data are spatially homogeneous, many experimental observables in nucleus-nucleus collisions are presented in terms of centrality cuts. These cuts can be related to impact parameter using the Glauber theory and it is thus usual in the description of such observables to convolute an assumed impact parameter distribution with the homogeneous nPDFs. In this study we use the Gribov theory of nuclear shadowing supplemented with information from diffraction to model the impact parameter distributions of nuclear shadowing ratio in the small-$x$ region. The modeled distributions are applied to the description of the centrality dependence of observables in deuteron-gold (d+Au) collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 200$ AGeV.