Tracing Gluon Saturation through Hadronization at EIC
Abstract
Gluon saturation provides a window into the nonlinear nature of the strong interaction in nuclear matter. One direct consequence of saturation is the kT broadening in the final state.We investigate how hadronization reshapes conventional signatures of gluon saturation at EIC within a complete event-generator framework. To this end, we implement in eHIJING an initial-state-radiation algorithm based on nonlinear small-x evolution and complete the events with beam remnants, final-state radiation, and hadronization. In our simulations, the signal of parton-level nuclear kT broadening is strongly diluted in both the nucleon energy correlator and leading-dihadron azimuthal decorrelation after hadronization. Global hadronic recoil, by contrast, remains sensitive to the underlying kT broadening. We further demonstrate that Bayesian unfolding of the global hadronic recoil provides access to the underlying hard-scattering kT distribution. These results establish the global hadronic recoil as a promising saturation observable at the EIC.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{ke2026tracing,
title = {{Tracing Gluon Saturation through Hadronization at EIC}},
author = {Weiyao Ke and Xu Liu and Yu Shi and Xin-Nian Wang and Jian Zhou},
howpublished = {HAL},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.04964},
eprint = {2609.04964},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://hal.science/hal-05760385v1},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Tracing Gluon Saturation through Hadronization at EIC
AU - Weiyao Ke
AU - Xu Liu
AU - Yu Shi
AU - Xin-Nian Wang
AU - Jian Zhou
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/04
PB - HAL
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.04964
UR - https://hal.science/hal-05760385v1
AB - Gluon saturation provides a window into the nonlinear nature of the strong interaction in nuclear matter. One direct consequence of saturation is the k_T broadening in the final state.We investigate how hadronization reshapes conventional signatures of gluon saturation at EIC within a complete event-generator framework. To this end, we implement in eHIJING an initial-state-radiation algorithm based on nonlinear small-x evolution and complete the events with beam remnants, final-state radiation, and hadronization. In our simulations, the signal of parton-level nuclear k_T broadening is strongly diluted in both the nucleon energy correlator and leading-dihadron azimuthal decorrelation after hadronization. Global hadronic recoil, by contrast, remains sensitive to the underlying k_T broadening. We further demonstrate that Bayesian unfolding of the global hadronic recoil provides access to the underlying hard-scattering k_T distribution. These results establish the global hadronic recoil as a promising saturation observable at the EIC.
ER -