Semi-inclusive Diffractive Deep Inelastic Scattering at Small-$x$

Abstract

Inspired by a recent study of Iancu, Mueller and Triantafyllopoulos [1] and earlier papers by Golec-Biernat and Wusthoff [2,3], we propose semi-inclusive diffractive deep inelastic scattering (SIDDIS) to investigate the gluon tomography in the nucleon and nuclei at small-$x$. The relevant diffractive quark and gluon parton distribution functions (DPDF) can be computed in terms of the color dipole S-matrices in the fundamental and adjoint representations, respectively. Novel correlations from the gluon tomography in the dipole S-matrix can be experimentally studied through the DPDFs in these processes at the future electron-ion collider (EIC).