Simultaneous Color Glass Condensate fit to deep inelastic scattering and forward hadron production at HERA, RHIC, and the LHC

Abstract

We present the first simultaneous fit to deep inelastic scattering (DIS) reduced cross sections from HERA and forward single inclusive hadron production (SIHP) from RHIC and the LHC in which the dipole amplitude is obtained from Balitsky--Kovchegov (BK) evolution within the Color Glass Condensate effective theory. We demonstrate that, using the LO BK equation with running coupling (with or without kinematical constraint) and a constant per-collider $K$-factor accounting for higher-order corrections, a global $χ^2/\mathrm{d.o.f.}$ close to unity is achieved in both schemes. The required $K$-factors are about a factor of two larger at RHIC than at the LHC, remarkably in agreement with threshold-resummed one-loop studies of forward production. In our setup and with the data available, we find the two observables to be complementary: the SIHP data tighten the constraint on the evolution speed of the dipole amplitude without introducing tension with the DIS description. We further quantify the dependence of the $K$-factors on the fragmentation-function set and the factorization scale, identifying these as the dominant systematic uncertainties to be addressed in future precision analyses of forward hadron production. We perform a full uncertainty analysis using the Hessian method, validated against a Monte Carlo Bayesian inference study.