Diffractive incoherent vector meson production off protons: a quark model approach to gluon fluctuation effects

Abstract

Fluctuations play an important role in diffractive production of vector mesons. It was in particular recently suggested, based on the Impact-Parameter dependent Saturation model (IPSat), that geometrical fluctuations triggered by the motion of the constituent quarks within the protons could explain incoherent diffractive processes observed at HERA. We propose a variant of the IPSat model which includes spatial and symmetry correlations between constituent quarks, thereby reducing the number of parameters needed to describe diffractive vector meson production to a single one, the size of the gluon cloud around each valence quark. The application to $J/\Psi$, $\rho$ and $\varphi$ diffractive electron and photon production cross sections reveal the important role of geometrical fluctuations in incoherent channels, while other sources of fluctuations are needed to fully account for electroproduction of light mesons, as well as photo production of $J/\Psi$ mesons at small momentum transfer.

17 pages, 15 figures, major revision, title changed, new sections included , figures added to discuss vector meson electroproduction, new references, version accepted for publication in EPJ C

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• Glauber Modeling in High Energy Nuclear Collisions
• Analysis of combined HERA data in the Impact-Parameter dependent Saturation model
• Revealing proton shape fluctuations with incoherent diffraction at high energy
• Nuclear enhancement and suppression of diffractive structure functions at high energies
• Coherent and incoherent $J/\psi$ photonuclear production in an energy-dependent hot-spot model
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• Energy dependence of dissociative $J/\psi$ photoproduction as a signature of gluon saturation at the LHC
• High Gluon Densities in Heavy Ions Collisions
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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Review of proton and nuclear shape fluctuations at high energy
• Relativistic corrections to the vector meson light front wave function
• Bayesian inference of the fluctuating proton shape
• Color charge correlations in the proton at NLO: beyond geometry based intuition
• Proton hot spots and exclusive vector meson production
• Coherent and incoherent vector meson electroproduction in the future electron-ion colliders: the hot-spot predictions
• Investigating the structure of gluon fluctuations in the proton with incoherent diffraction at HERA
• Reflective scattering at the LHC and two--scale structure of a proton
• Probing gluon density fluctuations at large momentum transfer $|t|$ at HERA