Breakdown of QCD factorization at large Feynman x -: art. no. 054606

Recent measurements by the BRAHMS Collaboration of high-p(T) hadron production at forward rapidities at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider found the relative production rate (d-Au)/(p-p) to be suppressed rather than enhanced. Examining other known reactions (forward production of light hadrons, the Drell-Yan process, heavy flavor production, etc.), one notes that all of these display a similar property, namely, their cross sections in nuclei are suppressed at large x(F). Since this is the region where x(2) is minimal, it is tempting to interpret this as a manifestation of coherence or of a color glass condensate, whereas it is actually a simple consequence of energy conservation and takes place even at low energies. We demonstrate that in all these reactions there is a common suppression mechanism that can be viewed, alternatively, as a consequence of a reduced survival probability for large rapidity gap processes in nuclei, a Sudakov suppression, an enhanced resolution of higher Fock states by nuclei, or an effective energy loss that rises linearly with energy. Our calculations agree with the data.