Could saturation effects be visible in a future electron-ion collider?

Abstract

We expect to observe parton saturation in a future electron - ion collider. In this letter we discuss this expectation in more detail considering two different models which are in good agreement with the existing experimental data on nuclear structure functions. In particular, we study the predictions of saturation effects in electron - ion collisions at high energies, using a generalization for nuclear targets of the b-CGC model, which describes the $ep$ HERA quite well. We estimate the total, longitudinal and charm structure functions in the dipole picture and compare them with the predictions obtained using collinear factorization and modern sets of nuclear parton distributions. Our results show that inclusive observables are not very useful in the search for saturation effects. In the small $x$ region they are very difficult to disentangle from the predictions of the collinear approaches . This happens mainly because of the large uncertainties in the latter. On the other hand, our results indicate that the contribution of diffractive processes to the total cross section is about 20 % at large A and small Q^2, allowing for a detailed study of diffractive observables. The study of diffractive processes becomes essential to observe parton saturation.

7 pages 5 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Quark contribution to the small-$x$ evolution of color dipole
• Triumvirate of Running Couplings in Small-x Evolution
• Solving The High Energy Evolution Equation Including Running Coupling Corrections
• Impact parameter dependent colour glass condensate dipole model
• Nuclear enhancement and suppression of diffractive structure functions at high energies
• Particle multiplicities in Lead-Lead collisions at the LHC from non-linear evolution with running coupling
• Geometric Scaling at RHIC and LHC
• Constraining the nuclear gluon distribution in $eA$ processes at RHIC
• Unitarity constraints for DIS off nuclei: predictions for electron-ion colliders
• Suppression of High Transverse Momentum ${\pi }^0$ Spectra in Au+Au Collisions at RHIC

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Exclusive vector meson production in electron-ion collisions
• Charm and longitudinal structure functions with the Kharzeev-Levin-Nardi model