Saturation of Nuclear Partons: the Fermi Statistics or Nuclear Opacity?

Abstract

We derive the two-plateau momentum distribution of final state (FS) quarks produced in deep inelastic scattering (DIS) off nuclei in the saturation regime. The diffractive plateau which dominates for small transverse momentum p measures precisely the momentum distribution of quarks in the beam photon, the role of the nucleus is simply to provide an opacity. The plateau for truly inelastic DIS exhibits a substantial nuclear broadening of the FS momentum distribution. We discuss the relationship between the FS quark densities and the properly defined initial state (IS) nuclear quark densities.The Weizsäcker-Williams glue of a nucleus exhibits a substantial nuclear dilution, still soft IS nuclear sea saturates because of the anti-collinear splitting of gluons into sea quarks.

8 pp., 1 eps fig, typos in eqs. (7),(8) corrected

References in corpus (2)

• Parton Saturation at Small x and in Large Nuclei
• Parton Saturation-An Overview

Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Nonlinear k_\perp-factorization for Quark-Gluon Dijet Production off Nuclei
• Nonlinear kT factorization for Forward Dijets in DIS off Nuclei in the Saturation Regime
• Quenching of Leading Jets and Particles: the p_t Dependent Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal effect from Nonlinear k_t Factorization
• Unitarity cutting rules for the nucleus excitation and topological cross sections in hard production off nuclei from nonlinear k_t-factorization
• High Density QCD, Saturation and Diffractive DIS