Angular pattern of minijet transverse energy flow in hadron and nuclear collisions

bstractThe azimuthal asymmetry of a minijet system produced at the early stage of nucleon-nucleon and nuclear collisions in a central rapidity window is studied. We show that, in pp collisions, the minijet-transverse-energy production in a central rapidity window is essentially unbalanced in azimuth because of asymmetric contributions in which only one minijet hits the acceptance window. We further study the angular pattern of the transverse-energy flow generated by semihard degrees of freedom at the early stage of high-energy nuclear collisions and its dependence on the number of semihard collisions in the models either including or neglecting soft contributions to the inelastic cross section at RHIC and LHC energies, as well as on the choice of infrared cutoff.