Joint ECFA-NuPECC-APPEC Workshop “Synergies between the EIC and the LHC”

Exclusive diffractive meson production represents a promising channel for investigating gluonic saturation inside nucleons and nuclei. I’ll discuss a systematic framework to deal with beyond leading power corrections at small-x, including the saturation regime, and obtain the γ∗ → M(ρ, φ, ω) impact factor with both incoming photon and outgoing meson carrying arbitrary polarizations. This is of particular interest, as the saturation scale at modern colliders, although entering a perturbative regime, is not large. As a result, higher-twist terms can lead to significant effects.

Based on:
R. Boussarie, M. Fucilla, L. Szymanowski and S. Wallon, Phys. Rev. Lett. 134 (2025)
no.4, 041901 and Phys. Rev. D 111 (2025) no.1, 014032