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Nuclear structure and saturation effects from diffractive vector meson production

Heikki Mäntysaari and Hendrik Roch

Björn Schenke

Chun Shen

Wenbin Zhao

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 014068 – Published 30 July, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/2628-2spx

Abstract

We study exclusive vector meson production in ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs) of a wide range of nuclei, and assess the potential of measurements to constrain the small-x structure of oxygen and neon nuclei. We employ an impact-parameter-dependent color glass condensate framework incorporating Jalilian-Marian, Iancu, McLerran, Weigert, Leonidov, Kovner evolution, with parameters constrained by a recent global Bayesian analysis of γ+p and γ+Pb data. We present predictions for coherent and incoherent J/ψ production in O+O and Ne+Ne UPCs at LHC energies, and quantify theoretical uncertainties using posterior samples from the calibration. We employ several nuclear structure models and find that t-differential observables are sensitive to the chosen model. We further study the mass-number dependence of saturation effects through nuclear suppression factors for coherent and incoherent vector meson production. Saturation-induced suppression increases systematically with both nuclear mass number and energy. Our results provide a unified framework for the systematic study of the onset of gluon saturation and nuclear structure at high energy, accessible in future UPC measurements at the LHC and at the electron-ion collider.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 014068– Published 30 July, 2026
  • Received 22 May 2026
  • Accepted 9 July 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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