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When JIMWLK evolution really matters: The example of incoherent diffraction

T. Lappi1,2,* and D. N. Triantafyllopoulos3,†

  • *Contact author: tuomas.v.v.lappi@jyu.fi
  • †Contact author: trianta@ectstar.eu
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 014036 – Published 17 July, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/m4h9-s6y6

Abstract

We consider high energy scattering in the effective theory of the color glass condensate. The most convenient degrees of freedom are Wilson lines encoding multiple gluon exchanges, whose evolution with energy follows the JIMWLK equation. Instead of using the latter, very often one resorts to a Gaussian approximation (GA), which is known to be remarkably accurate in describing a wide class of multigluon correlators whose expansion in the weak scattering limit starts with an exchange of only two gluons. Here we demonstrate, both analytically and numerically, that such an approximation is not valid for correlators which start with an exchange of four gluons. As a main example, we focus on incoherent diffraction in photon-nucleus collisions and we show that the discrepancy between the JIMWLK and the GA results is driven by weak scattering and further persists in the regime where unitarity corrections begin to become important. The JIMWLK calculation leads to cross sections which are systematically larger in all kinematic regimes of interest.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 014036– Published 17 July, 2026
  • Received 7 May 2026
  • Accepted 15 June 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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