High Density QCD and Saturation of Nuclear Partons

Abstract

We review the recent finding of the two-plateau momentum distribution of sea quarks in deep inelastic scattering off nuclei in the saturation regime. The diffractive plateau which dominates for small $\text{bp}$ measures precisely the momentum distribution of quarks in the beam photon, the rôle of the nucleus is simply to provide an opacity. The plateau for truly inelastic DIS exhibits a substantial nuclear broadening of the momentum distribution. Despite this nuclear broadening, the observed final state and initial state sea quark densities do coincide exactly. We emphasize how the saturated sea is generated from the nuclear-diluted Weizsäcker-Williams because of the anti-collinear splitting of gluons into sea quarks.

Comments: TO be published in Proceedings of the Conference on Quark Nuclear Physics (QNP'2002), June 9-14, Juelich, Germany, 4 pages, 1 fig