Gluon saturation effects at the nuclear surface: Inelastic cross section of proton–nucleus in the ultra-high-energy cosmic ray domain

2009/10/31 by L. Portugal, Licínio da Silva Portugal, T. Kodama · 8 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic physics #Cosmic ray #Cross section (physics) #Dipole #Glauber #Gluon #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Nuclear physics #Nucleus #Optics #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Proton #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Quantum chromodynamics #Quark #Saturation (graph theory) #Scattering #astro-ph.HE #hep-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.nuclphysa.2010.02.007

published in Nuclear Physics A 837(1-2), 1-14 (Elsevier BV) · Published in Nuclear Physics A, 29 pages, 5 figures, 1 table

openalex publication_date 2010/02/26 · arxiv created 2010/03/10 · arxiv updated 2014/11/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

Considering the high-energy limit of the QCD gluon distribution inside a nucleus, we calculate the proton-nucleus total inelastic cross section using a simplified dipole model. We show that, if gluon saturation occurs in the nuclear surface region, the total cross section of proton-nucleus collisions increases more rapidly as a function of the incident energy compared to that of a Glauber-type estimate. We discuss the implications of this with respect to recent ultra-high-energy cosmic ray experiments.

Citations

• Study of the Cosmic Ray Composition above 0.4 EeV using the Longitudinal Profiles of Showers observed at the Pierre Auger Observatory
• The dipole picture and saturation in soft processes
• Nuclear enhancement and suppression of diffractive structure functions at high energies
• Impact parameter dipole saturation model
• Saturation and universality in QCD at small x
• Air shower simulations in a hybrid approach using cascade equations
• Modification of the saturation model: Dokshitzer-Gribov-Lipatov-Altarelli-Parisi evolution