44055886
Chiral dynamics and the growth of the nucleon’s gluonic transverse size at smallx
We study the distribution of gluons in transverse space in the nucleon at moderately small x (~10^{-2}). At large transverse distances (impact parameters) the gluon density is generated by the 'pion cloud' of the nucleon, and can be calculated in terms of the gluon density in the pion. We investigate the large-distance behavior in two different approaches to chiral dynamics: i) phenomenological soft-pion exchange, ii) the large-N_c picture of the nucleon as a classical soliton of the pion field, which corresponds to degenerate N and Delta states. The large-distance contributions from the 'pion cloud' cause a \~20% increase in the overall transverse size of the nucleon if x drops significantly below M_pi/M_N. This is in qualitative agreement with the observed increase of the slope of the t-dependence of the J/psi photoproduction cross section at HERA compared to fixed-target energies. We argue that the glue in the pion cloud could be probed directly in hard electroproduction processes accompanied by 'pion knockout', gamma^* + N -> gamma (or rho, J/psi) + pi + N', where the transverse momentum of the emitted pion is large while that of the outgoing nucleon is restricted to values of order M_pi.
119292449
Nuclear physics with a medium-energy Electron-Ion Collider
A polarized ep/eA collider (Electron-Ion Collider, or EIC) with variable center-of-mass energy √s ∼ 20–70 GeV and luminosity ∼1034 cm−2 s−1 would be uniquely suited to address several outstanding questions of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) and the microscopic structure of hadrons and nuclei: i) the three-dimensional structure of the nucleon in QCD (sea quark and gluon spatial distributions, orbital motion, polarization, correlations); ii) the fundamental color fields in nuclei (nuclear parton densities, shadowing, coherence effects, color transparency); iii) the conversion of color charge to hadrons (fragmentation, parton propagation through matter, in-medium jets). We briefly review the conceptual aspects of these questions and the measurements that would address them, emphasizing the qualitatively new information that could be obtained with the collider. Such a medium-energy EIC could be realized at Jefferson Lab after the 12GeV Upgrade (MEIC), or at Brookhaven National Lab as the low-energy stage of eRHIC.
121347456
On nucleon parton distributions from the chiral quark-soliton model
125666710
Nucleon matrix elements of twist - three and twist -4 operators from the instanton vacuum
55072904
Transverse nucleon structure and diagnostics of hard parton-parton processes at LHC
We propose a new method to determine at what transverse momenta particle production in high-energy pp collisions is governed by hard parton-parton processes. Using information on the transverse spatial distribution of partons obtained from hard exclusive processes in ep/\gamma p scattering, we evaluate the impact parameter distribution of pp collisions with a hard parton-parton process as a function of p_T of the produced parton (jet). We find that the average pp impact parameters in such events depend very weakly on p_T in the range 2 < p_T < few 100 GeV, while they are much smaller than those in minimum-bias inelastic collisions. The impact parameters in turn govern the observable transverse multiplicity in such events (in the direction perpendicular to the trigger particle or jet). Measuring the transverse multiplicity as a function of p_T thus provides an effective tool for determining the minimum p_T for which a given trigger particle originates from a hard parton-parton process.
16303633
Rapidity gap survival in central exclusive diffraction: Dynamical mechanisms and uncertainties
We summarize our understanding of the dynamical mechanisms governing rapidity gap survival in central exclusive diffraction, pp -> p + H + p (H = high-mass system), and discuss the uncertainties in present estimates of the survival probability. The main suppression of diffractive scattering is due to inelastic soft spectator interactions at small pp impact parameters and can be described in a mean-field approximation (independent hard and soft interactions). Moderate extra suppression results from fluctuations of the partonic configurations of the colliding protons. At LHC energies absorptive interactions of hard spectator partons associated with the gg -> H process reach the black-disk regime and cause substantial additional suppression, pushing the survival probability below 0.01.
27937897
Creation and detection of a mesoscopic gas in a nonlocal quantum superposition.
We investigate the scattering of a quantum matter wave soliton on a barrier in a one-dimensional geometry, and we show that it can lead to mesoscopic quantum superposition states, where the atomic gas is in a coherent superposition of being in the half-space to the left of the barrier and being in the half-space to the right of the barrier. We propose an interferometric method to reveal the coherent nature of this superposition, and we discuss in detail the experimental feasibility.