The Glue and the Sea: Mapping Small-x Partons in the Color Glass Condensate

Prof. Farid Salazar, Temple University

Abstract

Two-particle azimuthal correlations serve as a powerful tool for probing gluon saturation dynamics in collider experiments. In the kinematic regime where the two particles are produced at forward rapidity but remain nearly back-to-back in transverse momentum, the differential cross-section calculated within the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) effective field theory (EFT) reveals a small- transverse-momentum-dependent (TMD)-like factorization. This TMD-CGC correspondence was first established at leading order (LO) in [1], where gluon TMD operators (with appropriate gauge link structure) were shown to arise from Wilson line correlators in the CGC framework.

In this seminar, I will demonstrate that the CGC-TMD correspondence holds at next-to-leading order (NLO) [2], highlighting the interplay between small-x factorization and Sudakov (soft) resummation. I will then extend this correspondence to sea quark-initiated channels at small-x [3], followed by a discussion of some of the phenomenological consequences.

[1] F. Dominguez, C. Marquet, B-W. Xiao, and F. Yuan. Phys.Rev.D 83 (2011) 10500
[2] P. Caucal, F. Salazar, B. Schenke, T. Stebel, and R. Venugopalan. Phys.Rev.Lett. 132 (2024) 8, 081902
[3] P. Caucal, E. Iancu, F. Salazar, and F. Yuan. [work in progress]

Biographical Sketch - Prof. Farid Salazar

Farid Salazar was born and raised in Lima, Peru. He earned his Ph.D. in Physics from Stony Brook University in 2021 while conducting research with the Nuclear Theory Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). Afterward, he held postdoctoral positions at UCLA, UC Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 2023, he joined the Institute for Nuclear Theory at the University of Washington as a Junior Fellow. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Physics at Temple University and holds a joint appointment with the RIKEN Brookhaven Research Center. His research focuses on studying the properties of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) matter in high-energy collisions with effective field theories.