The principal objective of this PhD topic is to contribute to a systematic understanding of the wealth of experimental data on proton-proton (pp) and proton-nucleus collisions (pA) currently coming from experiments performed at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva. Several key aspects of QCD dynamics in particle production reactions in pp and pA collisions at high energies will be studied within the framework of the color dipole approach [1-4]. The student will apply this technique to production of bound states of heavy quark-antiquark (such as J/y, y’ and U) and also to forward-central and forward-forward light hadron correlations at RHIC and LHC. Such medium-induced QCD phenomena as saturation, gluon shadowing, primordial transverse-momentum distributions, dipole propagation and orientation, elliptic flow as well as the parton energy loss in nuclear medium will be investigated.
[1] E. Basso, V. P. Goncalves, J. Nemchik, R. Pasechnik and M. Šumbera, Drell-Yan
phenomenology in the color dipole picture revisited, Phys. Rev. D 93, no. 3, 034023 (2016).
[2] E. Basso, V. P. Goncalves, M. Křelina, J. Nemchik and R. Pasechnik, Nuclear effects in
Drell-Yan pair production in high-energy pA collisions, Phys. Rev.D 93, no. 9, 094027 (2016).
[3] V.P. Goncalves, M. Křelina, J. Nemchik and R. Pasechnik, Drell-Yan process in pA
collisions: Path-integral treatment of coherence effects, Phys. Rev. D 94, no. 11, 114009
(2016).
[4] V.P. Goncalves, B. Kopeliovich, J. Nemchik, R. Pasechnik and I. Potashnikova, Heavy flavor
production in high-energy pp collisions: color dipole description, Phys. Rev. D 96, no. 1,
014010 (2017).