Diffractive Dijet Production in Deep Inelastic Scattering and Photon-Hadron Collisions in the Color Glass Condensate

TL;DR

This paper investigates how diffractive dijet production in deep inelastic scattering and photon-hadron collisions can serve as a sensitive probe of gluon saturation and dipole correlations within the Color Glass Condensate framework, revealing distinctive azimuthal and $t$-distribution features.

Contribution

It introduces the use of diffractive dijet observables as novel probes for gluon saturation and dipole orientation effects in the Color Glass Condensate formalism at leading order.

Findings

Diffractive dijet cross section is sensitive to dipole orientation.

$t$-distributions show dip structures in the saturation region.

Saturation enhances azimuthal jet correlations.

Abstract

We study exclusive dijet production in coherent diffractive processes in deep inelastic scattering and real (and virtual) photon-hadron ($\gamma^{(*)}$-h) collisions in the Color Glass Condensate formalism at leading order. We show that the diffractive dijet cross section is sensitive to the color-dipole orientation in the transverse plane, and is a good probe of possible correlations between the $q\bar{q}$-dipole transverse separation vector $\r$ and the dipole impact parameter $\b$. We also investigate the diffractive dijet azimuthal angle correlations and $t$-distributions in $\gamma^{(*)}$-h collisions and show that they are sensitive to gluon saturation effects in the small-$x$ region. In particular, we show that the $t$-distribution of diffractive dijet photo-production off a proton target exhibits a dip-type structure in the saturation region. This effect is similar to diffractive vector meson production. Besides, at variance with the inclusive case, the effect of saturation leads to stronger azimuthal correlations between the jets.