Hadron production with collinearly-improved unintegrated gluon distributions in high energy proton-proton collisions *

The collinearly-improved Balitsky-Kovchegov (ciBK) equation evolved unintegrated gluon distribution (UGD) is used for the first time to study hadron production in high energy proton-proton collisions in order to improve the predictive power of the Color Glass Condensate effective theory. We show that the ciBK equation evolved UGD provides a relatively better description of LHC data on the transverse momentum and integrated multiplicity distributions of charged hadron and neutral pion production for several collision energies compared with the running coupling Balitsky-Kovchegov (rcBK) equation evolved UGD. This is because the ciBK evolved UGD has a sharper transverse momentum distribution than the rcBK UGD. The impact of running coupling prescriptions on hadron production is studied, and it is found that the parent dipole and smallest dipole running coupling prescriptions provide similar depictions of the data. Moreover, the scale dependence of the fragmentation function is investigated by taking three typical values of scale. We find that the differences resulting from the scale dependence of the fragmentation function can be fully absorbed into the normalization factor, which lumps higher order corrections.