Systematics of strong nuclear amplification of gluon saturation from exclusive vector meson production in high energy electron-nucleus collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how gluon saturation affects the scaling behavior of vector meson production in high-energy electron-nucleus collisions, providing analytic insights and testable predictions for future collider experiments.

Contribution

It offers a systematic analysis of the nuclear and virtuality scaling modifications due to gluon saturation in exclusive vector meson production.

Findings

Gluon saturation significantly alters scaling with nuclear mass number and virtuality.

Provides analytic expressions for modified scaling exponents.

Offers quantitative predictions for Electron-Ion Collider experiments.

Abstract

We show that gluon saturation gives rise to a strong modification of the scaling in both the nuclear mass number $A$ and the virtuality $Q^2$ of the vector meson production cross-section in exclusive deep-inelastic scattering off nuclei. We present qualitative analytic expressions for how the scaling exponents are modified as well as quantitative predictions that can be tested at an Electron-Ion Collider.