Nuclear shadowing in deep-inelastic scattering on nuclei: Comparing predictions of three unitarization schemes

Abstract

The measurement of the nuclear structure functions ${F}_{2}^{A}(x,{Q}^{2})$ and ${F}_{L}^{A}(x,{Q}^{2})$ at the future electron-ion collider will be of great relevance to understanding the origin of nuclear shadowing and to probe gluon saturation effects. Currently there are several phenomenological models, based on very distinct approaches, which describe the scarce experimental data quite successfully. One of main uncertainties comes from the schemes used to include the effects associated with the multiple scatterings and to unitarize the cross section. In this paper we compare the predictions of three distinct unitarization schemes of the nuclear structure function ${F}_{2}^{A}$ that use the same theoretical input to describe the projectile-nucleon interaction. In particular, we consider as input the predictions of the color glass condensate formalism, which reproduce the inclusive and diffractive $ep$ HERA data. Our results demonstrate that experimental analysis of ${F}_{2}^{A}$ is able to discriminate between the unitarization schemes.