We study single inclusive hadron production in proton-proton and proton-nucleus collisions in the CGC framework. The parameters in the calculation are determined solely by standard nuclear geometry and by electron-proton deep inelastic scattering data, which is fit using the running coupling BK equation. We show that it is possible to obtain a good fit of the HERA inclusive cross section also without an anomalous dimension in the initial condition. We argue that one must consistently use the proton transverse area as measured by a high virtuality probe in DIS also for the single inclusive cross section in proton-proton and proton-nucleus collisions. We show that this leads to a midrapidity nuclear modification ratio RpA that approaches unity at high transverse momentum independently of √ s, in contrast to most CGC calculations in the literature. We also present predictions for future forward RpA measurements at the LHC. PACS numbers: 13.85.Ni, 13.85.Hd 24.85.+p, arXiv:1309.6963v1 [hep-ph]

We show within the saturation framework that measurements of exclusive vector meson production at high energy provide evidence for strong geometric fluctuations of the proton. In comparison, the effect of saturation scale and color charge fluctuations is weak. This knowledge will allow detailed future measurements of the incoherent cross section to tightly constrain the fluctuating geometry of the proton as a function of the parton momentum fraction x.

The differential cross section of exclusive diffractive vector meson production in electron proton collisions carries important information on the geometric structure of the proton. More specifically, the coherent cross section as a function of the transferred transverse momentum is sensitive to the size of the proton, while the incoherent, or proton dissociative cross section is sensitive to fluctuations of the gluon distribution in coordinate space. We show that at high energies the experimentally measured coherent and incoherent cross sections for the production of J/Ψ mesons are very well reproduced within the color glass condensate framework when strong geometric fluctuations of the gluon distribution in the proton are included. For ρ meson production we also find reasonable agreement. We study in detail the dependence of our results on various model parameters, including the average proton shape, analyze the effect of saturation scale and color charge fluctuations and constrain the degree of geometric fluctuations.

We solve the Balitsky-Kovchegov evolution equation at next-to-leading order accuracy including a resummation of large single and double transverse momentum logarithms to all orders. We numerically determine an optimal value for the constant under the large transverse momentum logarithm that enables including a maximal amount of the full NLO result in the resummation. When this value is used the contribution from the α 2 s terms without large logarithms is found to be small at large saturation scales and at small dipoles. Close to initial conditions relevant for phenomenological applications these fixed order corrections are shown to be numerically important.

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