Nuclear shadowing in deep inelastic scattering on nuclei: a closer look

Abstract

The measurement of the nuclear structure function $F_2^A (x,Q^2)$ at the future electron-ion collider (EIC) will be of great relevance to understand the origin of the nuclear shadowing and to probe gluon saturation effects. Currently there are several phenomenological models, based on very distinct approaches, which describe the scarce experimental data quite successfully. One of main uncertainties comes from the schemes used to include the effects associated to the multiple scatterings and to unitarize the cross section. In this paper we compare the predictions of three different unitarization schemes of the nuclear structure function which use the same theoretical input to describe the projectile-nucleon interaction. In particular, we consider as input the predictions of the Color Glass Condensate formalism, which reproduce the inclusive and diffractive $ep$ HERA data. Our results suggest that the experimental analysis of $F_2^A$ will be able to discriminate between the unitarization schemes.