Nuclear Theory/RIKEN Seminar

Single inclusive particle production cross sections in high energy hadron collisions at forward rapidity are an important benchmark process for the CGC picture of small x QCD. The process can be calculated in the "hybrid formalism", where a collinear large-x quark or gluon scatters off the dense color field of the target. Recent calculations at next-to-leading order in perturbation theory have not led to a stable physical result for the single inclusive cross section at high transverse momenta. The problem with these NLO calculations lies in the subtraction procedure for the soft "rapidity" divergence which must be absorbed into BK renormalization group evolution of the target. This talk discusses recent work to understand and resolve the problems with the subtraction procedure. In particular, we have recently implemented numerically the quark channel production cross section using a new rapidity factorization procedure proposed by Iancu et al. For a fixed coupling one does indeed obtain a physically meaningful cross section which is positive and reduces in a controlled way to previous leading order calculations. However, it is not yet clear how to generalize this to running coupling in a way that is fully consistent with previous leading order calculations in coordinate space.