Ballistic protons in incoherent exclusive vector meson production as a measure of rare parton fluctuations at an Electron-Ion Collider

Abstract

We argue that the proton multiplicities measured in Roman pot detectors at an electron ion collider can be used to determine centrality classes in incoherent diffractive scattering. Incoherent diffraction probes the fluctuations in the interaction strengths of multi-parton Fock states in the nuclear wavefunctions. In particular, the saturation scale that characterizes this multi-parton dynamics is significantly larger in central events relative to minimum bias events. As an application, we study the centrality dependence of incoherent diffractive vector meson production. We identify an observable which is simultaneously very sensitive to centrality triggered parton fluctuations and insensitive to details of the model.

5 pages, 4 figures, RevTEX V2: small clarifications, to be published in PRL

References in corpus (7)

• Analysis of combined HERA data in the Impact-Parameter dependent Saturation model
• Eccentric protons? Sensitivity of flow to system size and shape in p+p, p+Pb and Pb+Pb collisions
• J/Psi production in ultraperipheral Pb+Pb and p+Pb collisions at energies available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider
• Nuclear enhancement and suppression of diffractive structure functions at high energies
• Exclusive diffractive processes in electron-ion collisions
• The shape of the proton at high energies
• Determination of electron-nucleus collision geometry with forward neutrons

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Revealing proton shape fluctuations with incoherent diffraction at high energy
• Diffractive Dijet Production and Wigner Distributions from the Color Glass Condensate
• The importance of kinematic twists and genuine saturation effects in dijet production at the Electron-Ion Collider
• Inclusive prompt photon-jet correlations as a probe of gluon saturation in electron-nucleus scattering at small $x$
• Coherent and incoherent vector meson electroproduction in the future electron-ion colliders: the hot-spot predictions
• Diffractive deeply inelastic scattering in future electron-ion colliders
• Deeply virtual Compton scattering at small-$x$ in future Electron - Ion Colliders
• Exclusive vector meson production in electron-ion collisions at the EIC, LHeC and FCC-$eh$
• Exclusive processes in $ep$ collisions at the EIC and LHeC: A closer look on the predictions of saturation models
• Coherent and incoherent Upsilon production in ultraperipheral collisions at the Large Hadron Collider
• Coulomb corrections to inclusive cross sections at the future Electron - Ion Collider
• Scattering off the Color Glass Condensate