FROM EMC AND CRONIN EFFECTS TO SIGNALS OF QUARK–GLUON PLASMA

Abstract

The EMC and Cronin effects are explained by a unitarized evolution equation, in which the shadowing and antishadowing corrections are dynamically produced due to gluon fusions. For this sake, an alternative form of the GLR–MQ–ZRS equation is derived. The resulting gluon distributions, integrated and unintegrated, in protons and nuclei are used for analysis of the contributions of the initial parton distributions to the nuclear suppression factor in heavy-ion collisions. A simulation of the fractional energy loss is extracted from the data of RHIC and LHC, where the contributions of both nuclear shadowing and nuclear antishadowing effects are considered. We find a rapid crossover from weak energy loss to strong energy loss with the gluon jet at a universal critical energy, Ec ~ 10 GeV .