https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201611202010
Leading neutron production at HERA in the color dipole approach
1 Departamento de Ciências Exatas e da Terra, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Campus Diadema, Rua Prof. Artur Riedel, 275, Jd. Eldorado, 09972-270, Diadema, SP Brazil
2 High and Medium Energy Group, Instituto de Física e Matemática, Universidade Federal de Pelotas Caixa Postal 354, 96010-900, Pelotas, RS Brazil
3 Instituto de Física, Universidade de São Paulo, C.P. 66318, 05315-970 São Paulo, SP Brazil
a e-mail: babi.usp@gmail.com
b e-mail: victorpbg@gmail.com
c e-mail: diego.spiering@gmail.com
d e-mail: navarra@if.usp.br
Published online: 21 March 2016
In this work we study leading neutron production in e + p → e + n + X collisions at high energies and calculate the Feynman xL distribution of these neutrons. The differential cross section is written in terms of the pion flux and of the photon-pion total cross section. We describe this process using the color dipole formalism and, assuming the validity of the additive quark model, we relate the dipole-pion with the well determined dipoleproton cross section. In this formalism we can estimate the impact of the QCD dynamics at high energies as well as the contribution of gluon saturation effects to leading neutron production. With the parameters constrained by other phenomenological information, we are able to reproduce the basic features of the recently released H1 leading neutron spectra.
© Owned by the authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2016
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
