Tracking fast small color dipoles through strong gluon fields at the LHC

Abstract

We argue that the process gamma +A \to J/psi + gap + X at large momentum transfer provides a quick and effective way to test onset of a novel perturbative QCD regime of strong absorption for the interaction of small dipoles at the collider energies. We find that already the first heavy ion run at the LHC will allow to study this reaction with sufficient statistics via ultraperipheral collisions hence probing the interaction of q\bar q dipoles of sizes ~ 0.2 fm with nuclear media down to x ~ 10^{-5}.