Azimuthal asymmetries for quark pair production in pA collisions

Abstract

We study the azimuthal asymmetries for quark pair production in proton-nucleus collisions using a hybrid approach in which the nucleus is treated in the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) framework while the Lipatov approximation is applied on the proton side. Our treatment goes beyond the large N_c limit. We particularly focus on the so-called correlation limit where the imbalance of the transverse momentum of the quark pair is much smaller than the out-going individual quark transverse momenta. In this kinematic region, a matching between the hybrid approach and a factorization in terms of transverse momentum dependent parton distributions(TMDs) has been found. It is shown which of the various unpolarized and linearly polarized gluon TMD distributions contribute to $\cos 2 \phi$ and $\cos 4 \phi$ modulations of quark pair production.