Back-to-back inclusive dijets in DIS at small $x$: Gluon Weizs\"acker-Williams distribution at NLO

Abstract

In JHEP 11 (2022) 169, we performed the first complete computation of the back-to-back inclusive di-jet cross-section in Deeply Inelastic Scattering (DIS) at small $x_{\rm Bj}$ to next-to-leading order (NLO) in the Color Glass Condensate effective field theory (CGC EFT). We demonstrate here that for di-jets with relative transverse momentum $P_\perp$ and transverse momentum imbalance $q_\perp$, to leading power in $q_\perp/P_\perp$, the cross-section for longitudinally polarized photons can be fully factorized into the product of a perturbative impact factor and the nonperturbative Weizs\"{a}cker-Williams (WW) transverse momentum dependent (TMD) gluon distribution to NLO accuracy. The impact factor can further be expressed as the product of a universal soft factor which resums Sudakov double and single logs in $P_\perp/q_\perp$ and a coefficient function given by a remarkably compact analytic expression. We show that in the CGC EFT the WW TMD satisfies a kinematically constrained JIMWLK renormalization group evolution in rapidity. This factorization formula is valid to all orders in $Q_s/q_\perp$ for $q_\perp, Q_s \ll P_\perp$, where $Q_s$ is the semi-hard saturation scale that grows with rapidity.