Diffractive processes at next-to-leading order in the dipole picture

by Jani Penttala (UCLA)

Monday 2 Jun 2025, 16:00 → 18:00 Europe/Zurich

4/2-037 - TH meeting room (CERN)

Diffractive processes are very sensitive to the target’s gluon distribution in the high-energy limit, making them a good candidate for probing the target in the nonlinear region of quantum chromodynamics. The nonlinear effects are expected to eventually lead to gluon saturation which is naturally described within the color-glass condensate effective field theory. While there are strong hints of gluon saturation in the currently available data, no unambiguous signal has been observed. It is then important to improve the theoretical understanding of processes sensitive to saturation to find a clear difference between predictions from the linear and nonlinear regions of QCD. This includes calculating diffractive processes beyond the leading order in perturbation theory.In this talk, I will discuss the state-of-the-art NLO computations for diffractive processes in the dipole picture. I will outline the general method for doing NLO computations in this framework and discuss some subtleties in going beyond the leading order. Finally, I will show numerical results for exclusive processes in deep inelastic scattering along with comparisons to the experimental data.