Probing parton saturation and the gluon dipole via diffractive jet production at the Electron-Ion Collider

TL;DR

This paper proposes using diffractive dijet production at the Electron-Ion Collider as a novel method to probe gluon saturation, linking the process to the gluon distribution and saturation effects.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach to study gluon saturation through inelastic diffraction producing dijets, connecting the process to the gluon dipole and saturation scale.

Findings

Dijet imbalance relates to the saturation momentum Q_s.

Cross section factorizes into a hard part and a gluon distribution.

Saturation effects set initial conditions for DGLAP evolution.

Abstract

We demonstrate that hard dijet production via coherent inelastic diffraction is a promising channel for probing gluon saturation at the Electron-Ion Collider. By $inelastic$ diffraction we mean a process in which the two hard jets - a quark-antiquark pair generated by the decay of the virtual photon - are accompanied by a softer gluon jet, emitted by the quark or the antiquark. This process can be described as the elastic scattering of an effective gluon-gluon dipole. The cross section takes a factorised form, between a hard factor and a unintegrated ("Pomeron") gluon distribution describing the transverse momentum imbalance between the hard dijets. The dominant contribution comes from the black disk limit and leads to a dijet imbalance of the order of the target saturation momentum $Q_s$ evaluated at the rapidity gap. Integrating out the dijet imbalance, we obtain a collinear factorization where the initial condition for the DGLAP evolution is set by gluon saturation.