Probing the Color Glass Condensate in an electron-ion collider
Abstract
Perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (pQCD) predicts that the small-
x
gluons in a hadron wavefunction should form a Color Glass Condensate (CGC), characterized by a saturation scale
Q
s
(x,A)
which is energy and atomic number dependent. In this paper we study the predictions of CGC physics for electron - ion collisions at high energies. We consider that the nucleus at high energies acts as an amplifier of the physics of high parton densities and estimate the nuclear structure function
F
A
2
(x,
Q
2
)
, as well as the longitudinal and charm contributions, using a generalization for nuclear targets of the Iancu-Itakura-Munier model which describes the
ep
HERA data quite well. Moreover, we investigate the behavior of the logarithmic slopes of the total and longitudinal structure functions in the kinematical region of the future electron - ion collider eRHIC.