Lectures on Diffraction and Saturation of Nuclear Partons in DIS off Heavy Nuclei

Abstract

The Lorentz contraction of ultrarelativistic nuclei entails a spatial overlap and fusion (recombination, saturation) of partons belonging to different nucleons at the same impact parameter. In these lectures we present a consistent description of the fusion of partons in terms of nuclear attenuation of color dipole states of the photon and collective Weizsäcker-Williams (WW) gluon structure function of a nucleus. The point that all observables for DIS off nuclei are uniquely calculable in terms of the nuclear WW glue amounts to a new form of factorization in the saturation regime. We start with the theory of multichannel propagation of color dipoles in a nuclear medium including the color-singlet to color-octet to color-octet transitions. We show how the Glauber-Gribov formulas are recovered from the multichannel formalism. Then we derive the two-plateau momentum distribution of final state (FS) quarks produced in deep inelastic scattering (DIS) off nuclei in the saturation regime. Then we comment on the signatures of saturation in exclusive diffractive DIS. A large body of these lectures is on the recent theory of jet-jet inclusive cross sections. We show that for hard dijets the decorrelation momentum is of the order of the nuclear saturation momentum $Q_A$. For minijets with the transverse momentum below the saturation scale we predict a complete disappearance of the azimuthal jet-jet correlation. We conclude with comment on a possible relevance of the decorrelation of jets to the experimental data from the STAR-RHIC Collaboration.