Tracking fast small color dipoles through strong gluon fields at the LHC

Abstract

We argue that the process gamma +A \to J/psi + gap + X at large momentum transfer provides a quick and effective way to test onset of a novel perturbative QCD regime of strong absorption for the interaction of small dipoles at the collider energies. We find that already the first heavy ion run at the LHC will allow to study this reaction with sufficient statistics via ultraperipheral collisions hence probing the interaction of q\bar q dipoles of sizes ~ 0.2 fm with nuclear media down to x ~ 10^{-5}.

4 pages, final version published in PRL

References in corpus (2)

• The Physics of Ultraperipheral Collisions at the LHC
• Large t diffractive J/ψphotoproduction with proton dissociation in ultraperipheral pA collisions at LHC

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Disentangling coherent and incoherent quasielastic $J/\psi$ photoproduction on nuclei by neutron tagging in ultraperipheral ion collisions at the LHC
• Coherent rho and J/psi photoproduction in ultraperipheral processes with electromagnetic dissociation of heavy ions at RHIC and LHC
• Nucleon dissociation and incoherent $J/\psi$ photoproduction on nuclei in ion ultraperipheral collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider
• Diffractive $J/\Psi$ photoproduction at large momentum transfer in coherent hadron - hadron interactions at CERN LHC
• Diffractive vector meson production at large-$t$ in coherent hadronic interactions at CERN LHC
• The LHC potential for study of the small x gluon physics in ultraperipheral collisions of 3.5 TeV protons
• High $|t|$ diffractive vector meson production at the EIC
• New opportunities at the photon energy frontier
• DGLAP versus perturbative Pomeron in large momentum transfer hard diffractive processes at HERA and LHC