Hadron production in pA collisions at the LHC from the Color Glass Condensate

Abstract

We investigate the contribution of inelastic and elastic processes to single inclusive hadron production in proton-proton and proton (deuteron)-nucleus collisions at RHIC and the LHC. Using the hybrid formulation which includes both elastic and inelastic contributions, supplemented with the running-coupling Balitsky-Kovchegov equation, we get a good description of RHIC data. It is shown that inclusion of the inelastic terms makes the transverse momentum dependence of the production cross section steeper in the mid-rapidity region but does not affect the cross section in the very forward region. The inelastic processes also lead to a sharper increase of the nuclear modification factor R_{pA} with increasing p_T. We also make predictions for the nuclear modification factor in proton-nucleus collisions at the LHC (\sqrt{s}=4.4 and 8.8 TeV) at various rapidities using the Color Glass Condensate framework.