Polarized hyperons from pA scattering in the gluon saturation regime

We study the production of transversely polarized Λ hyperons in high-energy collisions of protons with large nuclei. The large gluon density of the target at saturation provides an intrinsic semi-hard scale which should naturally allow for a weak-coupling QCD description of the process in terms of a convolution of the quark distribution of the proton with the elementary quark-nucleus scattering cross section (resummed to all twists) and a fragmentation function. In this case of transversely polarized Λ production we employ a so-called polarizing fragmentation function, which is an odd function of the transverse momentum of the Λ relative to the fragmenting quark. Due to this k