Abstract
We study coherent diffractive photon and vector meson production in electron-proton and electron-nucleus collisions within the Color Glass Condensate effective field theory. We show that electron-photon and electron-vector meson azimuthal angle correlations are sensitive to nontrivial spatial correlations in the gluon distribution of the target, and perform explicit calculations using spatially dependent McLerran-Venugopalan initial color charge configurations coupled to the numerical solution of small JIMWLK evolution equations. We compute the cross-section differentially in and and find sizeable anisotropies in the electron-photon and electron- azimuthal correlations () in electron-proton collisions for the kinematics of the future Electron-Ion Collider. In electron-gold collisions these modulations are found to be significantly smaller (). We also compute incoherent diffractive production where we find that the azimuthal correlations are sensitive to fluctuations of the gluon distribution in the target.
11 More- Received 17 November 2020
- Accepted 27 April 2021
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.103.094026
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society