Probing short-range nucleon-nucleon interactions with an Electron-Ion Collider

Abstract

We derive the cross-section for exclusive vector meson production in high energy deeply inelastic scattering off a deuteron target that disintegrates into a proton and a neutron carrying large relative momentum in the final state. This cross-section can be expressed in terms of a novel gluon Transition Generalized Parton Distribution (T-GPD); the hard scale in the final state makes the T-GPD sensitive to the short distance nucleon-nucleon interaction. We perform a toy model computation of this process in a perturbative framework and discuss the time scales that allow the separation of initial and final state dynamics in the T-GPD. We outline the more general computation based on the factorization suggested by the toy computation: in particular, we discuss the relative role of "point-like" and "geometric" Fock configurations that control the parton dynamics of short range nucleon-nucleon scattering. With the aid of exclusive $J/\Psi$ production data at HERA, as well as elastic nucleon-nucleon cross-sections, we estimate rates for exclusive deuteron photo-disintegration at a future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). Our results, obtained using conservative estimates of EIC integrated luminosities, suggest that center-of-mass energies $s_{NN}\sim 12$ GeV${}^2$ of the neutron-proton subsystem can be accessed. We argue that the high energies of the EIC can address outstanding dynamical questions regarding the short-range quark-gluon structure of nuclear forces by providing clean gluon probes of such "knockout" exclusive reactions in light and heavy nuclei.

51 pages, 17 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Evidence for the Strong Dominance of Proton-Neutron Correlations in Nuclei
• Analysis of combined HERA data in the Impact-Parameter dependent Saturation model
• Short Range Correlations and the EMC Effect
• Hyperon-mixed neutron star with universal many-body repulsion
• Calculating TMDs of a Large Nucleus: Quasi-Classical Approximation and Quantum Evolution
• Ballistic protons in incoherent exclusive vector meson production as a measure of rare parton fluctuations at an Electron-Ion Collider
• Determination of electron-nucleus collision geometry with forward neutrons
• Why we need an Electron-Ion Collider

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Nucleon-Nucleon Correlations, Short-lived Excitations, and the Quarks Within
• Mining for Gluon Saturation at Colliders
• Precision Studies of QCD in the Low Energy Domain of the EIC
• Review of the electric dipole moment of light nuclei
• Next-to-next-to-leading order QCD analysis of spin-dependent parton distribution functions and their uncertainties: Jacobi polynomials approach
• Extracting many-body color charge correlators in the proton from exclusive DIS at large Bjorken x
• Probing short-range correlations in the deuteron via incoherent diffractive $J/\psi$ production with spectator tagging at the EIC
• Sub-threshold $J/\psi$ and ${\rm Y}$ Production in $\gamma A$ Collisions
• Gluonic Probe for the Short Range Correlation in Nucleus