Speaker
Description
Confirming gluon saturation at the Electron--Ion Collider requires observables sensitive to saturation-induced transverse structure that survive hadronization. We present an event generator implementing folded small-$x$ evolution for proton and gold targets, connecting nonlinear gluon dynamics to exclusive final states through complete shower and hadronization. Angular energy flow and leading-hadron azimuthal decorrelation show weak sensitivity to saturation dynamics, diluted by remnant fragmentation and hadronization effects. In contrast, a collective Breit-frame vector recoil provides a measured Au/proton ratio and a conditional proton-referenced inference of nuclear broadening. Comparisons between Pythia string fragmentation and Herwig cluster hadronization show that the inferred nuclear broadening depends only weakly on the hadronization model. Exact common-hard-state and full-event response-transfer tests separate the shared fragmentation kernel from target-dependent ISR, remnant, and color-flow effects. This provides a controlled route to test whether multiparticle correlations retain saturation information at EIC energies where dijet reconstruction becomes unreliable.
| Academic Status | I am a Ph.D. student |
|---|
