Abstract
We present predictions for the distribution of rapidity gaps in realistic kinematics of future electron-ion colliders, based on numerical solutions of the original Kovchegov-Levin equation and of its next-to-leading extension taking into account the running of the strong coupling. We find that for the rapidities we have considered, the fixed and the running coupling equations lead to different distributions, rather insensitive to the chosen prescription in the running coupling case. The obtained distributions for the fixed coupling framework exhibit a shape characteristic of a recently proposed partonic picture of diffractive dissociation already at rapidities accessible at future electron-ion colliders. The modification of this shape in the running coupling case can also be understood qualitatively from that picture. Our results confirm the relevance of measurements of such observables for the microscopic understanding of diffractive dissociation in the framework of quantum chromodynamics.
Highlights
The observation of diffractive events accounting for about 10% of all events in deeply inelastic electron-proton collisions at DESY HERA [1,2] was a striking experimental discovery
As the high rate of such events can be interpreted as a smoking gun for the onset of high parton density effects [4,5,6,7], and diffractive events can give insights into the spatial distribution of the gluonic content of hadrons, their detailed investigation is among main goals at future electron-ion colliders [9,10,11]
The scattering is more elastic and we are closer to the black-disk limit, which results in a stronger suppression of the rapidity gap distributions Rdip at τ < 0
Summary
The observation of diffractive events accounting for about 10% of all events in deeply inelastic electron-proton collisions at DESY HERA [1,2] was a striking experimental discovery. The first investigation on the rapidity gap distribution in the dipole-nucleus scattering was already presented in Ref. [14] based on the analytical solution of a simplified version of the Kovchegov-Levin equation at leading order This equation was studied numerically in Ref. In a slightly different approach, there has been an attempt recently in deriving the rapidity gap distribution in the diffractive dissociation of small dipoles off nuclei at an asymptotic high energy based on the color dipole model [27,28]. We mainly study the rapidity gap distribution in diffractive deep-inelastic virtual photon-nucleus scattering.
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