Boosted saturation bound in colliding nuclei

Abstract

Interaction with a nucleus in pA collisions enhances the higher Fock components in the projectile proton. Effectively, this corresponds to an increase of the hard scale of the process by the saturation momentum Q^2 -> Q^2+Q_{sA}^2, which leads to an increased gluon distribution function at small x (but suppressed at x -> 1) compared to that in pp collisions. In the case of AA collisions the gluon distributions of bound nucleons in both nuclei turn out to be enhanced, i.e. to be boosted to higher saturation scales compared to pA collisions. A set of bootstrap equations relating the saturation scales in the colliding nuclei is derived and solved. The boosting effect has a moderate magnitude at the energies of RHIC, but becomes significant at LHC.