Probing the Color Glass Condensate in $pp$ collisions at forward rapidities and very low transverse momenta

Abstract: The description of the hadron production at very forward rapidities and low transverse momentum is usually made using phenomenological models based on nonperturbative physics. However, at high energies and large rapidities the wave function of one of the projectiles is probed at very small Bjorken $x$, being characterized by a large number of gluons. In this kinematical regime, a new state of matter - the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) - is expected to be formed. One the main characteristics of such system is the presence of a new dynamical momentum scale, the saturation scale $Q_s$, which can assume values very larger than the QCD confinement scale $\Lambda_{QCD}$ and give the scale of the running coupling constant. In this paper we assume that in particular kinematical region probed by LHC forward (LHCf) experiment the saturation scale can be considered the hard momentum scale present in the process and calculate the forward neutral pion production at very low-$p_T$ using a perturbative approach. We demonstrate that the CGC formalism is able to successfully describe the LHCf data, which can be considered as a compelling indication of the presence of non-linear QCD effects at LHC energies.