Exclusive diffractive processes in electron-ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new dipole model-based technique for calculating cross-sections of diffractive vector meson production and DVCS in electron-ion collisions, providing insights into gluon saturation and spatial gluon distributions.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel method and a new event generator for studying exclusive diffractive processes in electron-ion collisions, enabling extraction of gluon distributions.

Findings

Predicted differential cross-sections for $J/\psi$ and $\phi$ production.

Demonstrated feasibility of extracting gluon spatial distribution F(b).

Introduced a new event generator for future collider studies.

Abstract

We present a new technique to calculate the cross-section for diffractive vector meson production and DVCS in electron-ion collisions based on the dipole model. The measurement of these processes can provide valuable information on non-linear QCD phenomena, such as gluon saturation, and is the the only known way to gain insight into the spatial distribution of gluons in nuclei. We present predictions of differential cross-section distribution $d\sigma/dQ^2$ and $d\sigma/dt$ for $J/\psi$ and $\phi$ meson production for diffractive processes of heavy nuclei and demonstrate the feasibility of extracting the gluon source distribution of heavy nuclei, F(b), from coherent diffraction. We briefly introduce a new event generator based on our method that can be used for studying exclusive diffractive processes at a future electron-ion collider.