Geometric scaling violations in the central rapidity region of image collisions at RHIC Original Research Article

We show that geometric scaling is satisfied to good accuracy in the forward region of d+Au collisions at RHIC. Scaling violations do show up, however, at mid-rapidity, and the anomalous dimension of the small-x gluon distribution evolves to near its DGLAP limit for transverse momenta of a few GeV. This represents a first consistency check of RHIC deuteron–nucleus and HERA DIS phenomenology, and of the universality of the underlying color glass condensate (CGC) theory, which describes both phenomena. It also reconciles successful leading-twist LO and NLO perturbative QCD computations of mid-rapidity particle production with small-x evolution. Finally, we introduce a new parameterization for the anomalous dimension of the small-x gluon distribution which properly reproduces known theoretical limits at large rapidity, at large virtuality, and on the saturation boundary, and still fits the available data from d+Au collisions at RHIC. We find indications that sub-asymptotic terms in the rapidity-evolution of the anomalous dimension are large.