Speaker
Description
The center-of-mass energies available at modern accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and at future generation accelerators, such as the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) and Future Circular Collider (FCC), offer us a unique opportunity to investigate hadronic matter under the most extreme conditions ever reached. One of the most intriguing phenomena of strong interaction is the so-called gluon saturation in nucleons and nuclei. In the saturation regime, the density of partons, per unit transverse area, in hadronic wavefunctions becomes very large leading to non-linear effects, that are described by the Balitsky-JIMWLK hierarchy of equations.
In this talk, we present a series of results aimed at bringing saturation physics and gluon tomography into an era of precision. In particular: 1) the NLO cross-sections of diffractive single and double hadron photo- or electroproduction with large $p_T$, on a nucleon or a nuclei and 2) the amplitudes for exclusive production of a $\rho$-meson with next-to-leading power corrections. This new class of processes provides an access to precision physics of gluon saturation dynamics, with very promising future phenomenological studies at the EIC, or, at the LHC in $p A$ and $A A$ scattering, using Ultra Peripheral Collisions (UPC).