Higgs and Particle Production in Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions
By: Zhe Liu
Publisher: [publisher not identified]
Published: 2015
Place of publication: [New York, N.Y.?]
Language: eng
Description: We apply a diagrammatic approach to study Higgs boson, a color-neutral heavy particle, production in nucleus-nucleus collisions in the saturation framework without quantum evolution. We assume the strong coupling constant much smaller than one. Due to the heavy mass and colorless nature of Higgs particle, final state interactions are absent in our calculation. In order to treat the two nuclei dynamically symmetric, we use the Coulomb gauge which gives the appropriate light cone gauge for each nucleus. To further eliminate initial state interactions we choose specific prescriptions in the light cone propagators. We start the calculation from only two nucleons in each nucleus and then demonstrate how to generalize the calculation to higher orders diagrammatically. We simplify the diagrams by the Slavnov-Taylor-Ward identities. The resulting cross section is factorized into a product of two Weizsäcker-Williams gluon distributions of the two nuclei when the transverse momentum of the produced scalar particle is around the saturation momentum.

To our knowledge this is the first process where an exact analytic formula has been formed for a physical process, involving momenta on the order of the saturation momentum, in nucleus-nucleus collisions in the quasi-classical approximation. Since we have performed the calculation in an unconventional gauge choice, we further confirm our results in Feynman gauge where the Weizsäcker-Williams gluon distribution is interpreted as a transverse momentum broadening of a hard gluons traversing a nuclear medium. The transverse momentum factorization manifests itself in light cone gauge but not so clearly in Feynman gauge. In saturation physics there are two different unintegrated gluon distributions usually encountered in the literature: the Weizsäcker-Williams gluon distribution and the dipole gluon distribution. The first gluon distribution is constructed by solving classical Yang-Mills equation of motion in the McLerran-Venugopalan model, while the second gluon distribution is related to the dipole scattering amplitude.

So far, the quantum structure of the dipole gluon distribution has not been thoroughly investigated. Applying the same diagrammatic techniques, we carry out a detail study of the quantum structure of the color dipole gluon distribution, and then compare it with that of the Weizsäcker-Williams gluon distribution.
Notes: Department: Physics.

Thesis advisor: Alfred H. Mueller.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 2015.