Systematics of strong nuclear amplification of gluon saturation from exclusive vector meson production in high energy electron–nucleus collisions

Abstract

We show that gluon saturation gives rise to a strong modification of the scaling in both the nuclear mass number A and the virtuality Q 2 of the vector meson production cross-section in exclusive deep-inelastic scattering off nuclei. We present qualitative analytic expressions for how the scaling exponents are modified as well as quantitative predictions that can be tested at an Electron–Ion Collider.