Triangle Nuclear Theory Colloquium - Mining for gluon saturation at colliders

A central goal of the future Electron-Ion Collider and of upcoming upgrades at the Large Hadron Collider is the search for a new regime of nuclear matter known as the Color Glass Condensate (CGC). In this extreme state, matter is dominated by an exceptionally dense system of gluons, the particles responsible for binding quarks inside protons and nuclei. Over the past two decades, predictions from the CGC effective theory have been confronted with data from HERA, RHIC, and the LHC, yielding intriguing hints of gluon saturation, although definitive evidence remains elusive.

In this colloquium, I will review recent developments in the CGC framework and discuss how this physics can be explored through measurements at current and future colliders. I will highlight several novel observables that offer promising new avenues for uncovering this dense gluonic regime. I will conclude with a brief discussion of the CGC's broader connections to other areas of physics.