Signature of gluon saturation in forward di-hadron correlations at the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract: We argue that gluon saturation effects may be visible in Large Hadron Collider (LHC) data. We look at the centrality dependence of the away-side peak of two-particle correlations measured in p-Pb collisions, using both ALICE data at midrapidity, and LHCb data at forward rapidity. Once the collective flow-like signal measured at the near-side peak is removed from the correlation function, the centrality dependence of the away-side peak turns out to be much stronger in the forward region than at midrapidity. We argue that this is a very specific prediction of the saturation framework, and we compare LHCb data to a state-of-the-art calculation within the Color Glass Condensate theory.