Angular pattern of minijet transverse energy flow in hadron and nuclear collisions

Abstract.

The azimuthal asymmetry of a minijet system produced at the early stage of nucleon–nucleon and nuclear collisions in a central rapidity window is studied. We show that in pp collisions the minijet transverse energy production in a central rapidity window is essentially unbalanced in the azimuth due to asymmetric contributions in which only one minijet hits the acceptance window. We further study the angular pattern of the transverse energy flow generated by the semihard degrees of freedom at the early stage of high energy nuclear collisions and its dependence on the number of semihard collisions in the models both including and neglecting soft contributions to the inelastic cross section at RHIC and LHC energies as well as on the choice of the infrared cutoff.