Color transparency in incoherent electroproduction of ρ mesons off nuclei

Abstract

Color transparency (CT) phenomena in elastic electroproduction of vector mesons off nuclei are usually infected by the onset of coherence length (CL) effects. However, at low energies corresponding to the CLAS experiment at Jefferson Lab (JLab), one can study practically the net CT effects, since CL is much shorter than the nuclear radius. We investigate various manifestations of CT effects using rigorous quantum mechanical approach based on the path integral technique. We include also the effects of ρ meson decay inside the nucleus leading to a rise of the nuclear suppression towards small values of Q2. Motivated by the last CLAS data we predict the A, Q2 and lc dependence of nuclear transparency for ρ0 mesons produced incoherently off nuclei. We also perform predictions for expected signal of CT corresponding to the planned JLab upgrade to 12 GeV electron beam.