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

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.

Comments: 10 pages, 9 figures. v2: matches the version published in Phys. Lett. B