Ballistic protons in incoherent exclusive vector meson production as a measure of rare parton fluctuations at an Electron-Ion Collider

Understand

We argue that the proton multiplicities measured in Roman pot detectors at an electron ion collider can be used to determine centrality classes in incoherent diffractive scattering.

• Incoherent diffraction probes the fluctuations in the interaction strengths of multi-parton Fock states in the nuclear wavefunctions.
• In particular, the saturation scale that characterizes this multi-parton dynamics is significantly larger in central events relative to minimum bias events.
• As an application, we study the centrality dependence of incoherent diffractive vector meson production.