Nuclear Shadowing and Coherence Length for Longitudinal and Transverse Photons

Abstract

Motivated by the recent results for DIS off nuclei from the HERMES experiment we have performed a systematic study of shadowing for transverse and longitudinal photons. We found that the coherence length which controls the onset of nuclear shadowing at small x_{Bj} is much longer for longitudinal than transverse photons, and is much shorter for shadowing of gluons. The light-cone Green function approach we apply properly treats shadowing in the transition region x_{Bj}>0.01. It also incorporates the nonperturbative effects and is legitimate at small Q^2. We calculate nuclear shadowing and compare with data from the HERMES and NMC experiments. Although we expect different nuclear shadowing for longitudinal and transverse photons, numerically it cannot explain the strong effect observed by the HERMES collaboration.