Narrow Results

The STAR Collaboration is performing a wide range of measurements to determine the gluon helicity distribution in the proton. Gluon-gluon and quark-gluon scattering dominate jet production in proton-proton collisions at RHIC, so the longitudinal double-spin asymmetry, $A_{LL}$, for jet production places significant constraints on the gluon polarization in the proton. In recent years STAR has recorded large longitudinally polarized $pp$ data sets at both $\sqrt{s}=200$ GeV and $510$ GeV. The 2009 STAR inclusive jet $A_{LL}$ measurements at $\sqrt{s}=200$ GeV show the first experimental evidence of non-zero gluon polarization over the Bjorken-$x$ range, $x>0.05$. Furthermore, data collected at $\sqrt{s}=510$ GeV during the 2012 and 2013 RHIC runs allow access to the gluon polarization at lower $x$. In this talk, I will present the final results of the 2009 inclusive jet $A_{LL}$ measurement at $200$ GeV, the analysis status of the 2012 inclusive jet $A_{LL}$ measurement at $510$ GeV, and the status of di-jet and other STAR measurements that are sensitive to gluon polarization.

The parton distribution functions (PDFs) provide process-independent information about the quarks and gluons inside hadrons. Although the gluon PDF can be obtained from a global fit to experimental data, it is not constrained well in the large-$x$ region. Theoretical gluon-PDF studies are much fewer than those of the quark PDFs. In this work, we present the first lattice-QCD results that access the $x$-dependence of the gluon unpolarized PDF of the nucleon. The lattice calculation is carried out with nucleon momenta up to 2.16 GeV, lattice spacing $a\approx 0.12$ fm, and with valence pion masses of 310 and 690 MeV. We use reduced Ioffe-time distributions to cancel the renormalization and implement a one-loop perturbative pseudo-PDF gluon matching. We neglect mixing of the gluon operator with the quark singlet sector. Our matrix-element results in coordinate space are consistent with those obtained from the global PDF fits of CT18 NNLO and NNPDF3.1 NNLO. Our fitted gluon PDFs at both pion masses are consistent with global fits in the $x>0.3$ region.

The coherent hadron production analogous to Cherenkov radiation of photons gives rise to the ring-like events. Being projected on the ring diameter they produce the two-bump structure recently observed for the away-side jets at RHIC. The position of the peaks and their height determine such properties of the hadronic medium as its nuclear refractive index, the parton density, the free path length and the energy loss of Cherenkov gluons. Cherenkov gluons may be responsible for the asymmetry of dilepton mass spectra near ρ-meson observed in experiment. Beside comparatively low energy gluons observed at RHIC, there could be high energy gluons at LHC, related to the high energy region of positive real part of the forward scattering amplitude and possessing different characteristics. This would allow to scan (x, Q²)-plane determining the parton densities in its various regions.

Sometime back, a self-similarity based model of the proton structure function at small $x$ was proposed by Lastovicka. We make reanalysis of this model with most recent HERA data. No significance difference with the earlier analysis is found. Both the analyses have singularity within the kinematical range of $x$: $0\le x\le 1$. We therefore study the model with the additional assumption that it should be singularity free, imposing positivity conditions on the model parameters. This results in a new model which is, however, phenomenologically valid only in a limited low $Q^2$ range. We therefore make further generalization of the defining self-similar unintegrated Parton Density Function (uPDF) and show that the with proper generalizations and initial conditions on them not only remove the undesired singularity but also results in a structure function with logarithmic growth in $Q^2$ closer to QCD. The phenomenological range of validity is then found to be much larger than the earlier versions. We also extrapolate the models to large $x$ in a parameter-free way. The possibility of incorporation of Transverse Momentum Dependent (TMD) PDF in this approach is explored as well.

An overview is given on key physics, detector and accelerator aspects of the LHeC including its further development with emphasis to its role as the cleanest microscope of parton dynamics and a precision Higgs facility.

Measurements of the production of high-p_T direct photons by a 515 GeV/c π^- beam and 530 and 800 GeV/c proton beams in interactions with Be and H₂ targets are presented. The data span the kinematic ranges of 3.5 < p_T < 12 GeV/c in transverse momentum and 1.5 units in rapidity. The inclusive direct-photon cross sections are compared with NLO pQCD calculations and expectations based on a phenomenological parton-k_T model.

Heavy quarkonium production is a powerful implement to study the strong interaction dynamics and QCD theory. Fragmentation is the dominant production mechanism for heavy quarkonia with large transverse momentum. With the large heavy quark mass, the relative motion of the heavy quark pair inside a heavy quarkonium is effectively nonrelativistic and it is also well known that their fragmentation functions can be calculated in the perturbative QCD framework. Here, we analytically calculate the process-independent fragmentation functions for a gluon to split into the spin-singlet and spin-triplet $S$-wave heavy quarkonia using three different scenarios. We will show that the fragmentation probability of the gluon into the spin-triplet bound-state is the biggest one.

Froissart bound implies that the total proton–proton cross-section (or equivalently proton structure function) cannot rise faster than ${log}^{2}s\sim {log}^2\frac{1}{x}$. Compatibility of such behavior with the notion of self-similarity in proton structure function was suggested by us sometime back. In the present work, we generalize and improve it further by considering more recent self-similarity based models of proton structure functions and compare with recent data as well as with the model of Block, Durand, Ha and McKay.

A review is presented of recent results in QCD from the H1 and ZEUS experiments at HERA, emphasizing the use of higher order calculations to describe the data.