Scaling properties of exclusive vector meson production cross section from gluon saturation

Abstract

It is already known from phenomenological studies that in exclusive deep-inelastic scattering off nuclei there appears to be a scaling behavior of vector meson production cross section in both nuclear mass number, $A$, and photon virtuality, $Q^2$, which is strongly modified due to gluon saturation effects. In this work we continue those studies in a realistic setup based upon using the Monte Carlo event generator Sar{\em t}re. We make quantitative predictions for the kinematics of the Electron-Ion Collider, focusing on this $A$ and $Q^2$ scaling picture, along with establishing a small region of squared momentum transfer, $t$, where there are signs of this scaling that may potentially be observed at the EIC. Our results are represented as pseudo-data of vector meson production diffractive cross section and/or their ratios, which are obtained by parsing data collected by the event generator through smearing functions, emulating the proposed detector resolutions for the future EIC.

26 pages and 18 figures