Saturation effects in exclusive vector meson production in DIS

TL;DR

This paper explores how saturation effects influence exclusive vector meson production in DIS, using a hot spot model within the CGC framework, revealing mild effects at current energies but increased suppression with higher charge densities.

Contribution

It introduces a hot spot model to analyze saturation effects in vector meson production within the CGC framework, highlighting the dependence on charge density and momentum transfer.

Findings

Saturation effects are mild at current energy ranges.

Suppression of cross sections increases with higher color-charge density.

The hot spot model effectively captures fluctuations in the proton structure.

Abstract

We investigate saturation effects in exclusive vector meson production in deep inelastic scattering (DIS), where we model fluctuations within the target protons as localized color-charge hotspots. Based on the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) framework and the dipole picture for vector meson production, we examine the dependencies of coherent and incoherent scattering cross sections on the momentum transfer. We draw conclusions on the effectiveness of our hot spot model and the strength of the suppression of the scattering cross sections caused by saturation effects. We find that saturation has mild effects in the given energy and charge-density ranges, but can also show that suppression becomes more prominent as the color-charge density inside the proton increases.