Total gluon shadowing due to fluctuation effects

Abstract

We show a new physical phenomenon expected for the ratio R_{pA} of the unintegrated gluon distribution of a nucleus over the unintegrated gluon distribution of a proton scaled up by the atomic factor A^{1/3} in the fluctuation-dominated (diffusive scaling) region at high energy. We calculate the dependence of R_{pA} on the atomic number A, the rapidity Y and the transverse gluon momentum k_{\perp}. We find that R_{pA} exhibits an increasing gluon shadowing with growing rapidity, approaching 1/A^{1/3} at asymptotic rapidities which means total gluon shadowing, due to the effect of gluon number fluctuations or Pomeron loops. The increase of R_{pA} with rising gluon momentum decreases as the rapidity grows. In contrast, in the geometric scaling region where the effect of fluctuations is negligible, the ratio R_{pA} shows only partial gluon shadowing in the fixed-coupling case, basically independent on the rapidity and the gluon momentum.