Elliptic Flow in Small Systems due to Elliptic Gluon Distributions?

Understand

We investigate the contributions from the so-called elliptic gluon Wigner distributions to the rapidity and azimuthal correlations of particles produced in high energy $pA$ collisions by applying the double parton scattering mechanism.

• We compute the `elliptic flow' parameter $v_2$ as a function of the transverse momentum and rapidity, and find qualitative agreement with experimental observations.
• This shall encourage further developments with more rigorous studies of the elliptic gluon distributions and their applications in hard scattering processes in $pp$ and $pA$ collisions.