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.2

Nuclear shadowing in DIS at moderately small x is suppressed by the nuclear formfactor and depends on the effective mass of a hadronic fluctuation of the virtual photon. We propose a solution to the problems (i) of how to combine a definite transverse size of the fluctuation with a definite effective mass, and (ii) of how to include the nuclear formfactor in the higher multiple scattering terms. Comparison of the numerical results with known approximations shows a substantial difference.

At high energies, Drell-Yan (DY) dilepton production viewed in the target rest frame should be interpreted as bremsstrahlung and can be expressed in terms of the same color dipole cross section as DIS. We compute DY cross sections on a nucleon target with the realistic parameterization for the dipole cross section saturated at large separations. The results are compared to experimental data and predictions for RHIC are presented. The transverse momentum distribution of the DY process is calculated and energy growth is expected to be steeper at large than at small transverse momenta. We also calculate the DY angular distribution and investigate deviations from the 1 + cos 2 θ shape.

We study Drell-Yan (DY) dilepton production in proton(deuterium)-nucleus and in nucleus-nucleus collisions within the light-cone color dipole formalism. This approach is especially suitable for predicting nuclear effects in the DY cross section for heavy ion collisions, as it provides the impact parameter dependence of nuclear shadowing and transverse momentum broadening, quantities that are not available from the standard parton model. For p(D)+A collisions we calculate nuclear shadowing and investigate nuclear modification of the DY transverse momentum distribution at RHIC and LHC for kinematics corresponding to coherence length much longer than the nuclear size. Calculations are performed separately for transversely and longitudinally polarized DY photons, and predictions are presented for the dilepton angular distribution. Furthermore, we calculate nuclear broadening of the mean transverse momentum squared of DY dileptons as function of the nuclear mass number and energy. We also predict nuclear effects for the cross section of the DY process in heavy ion collisions. We found a substantial nuclear shadowing for valence quarks, stronger than for the sea.Comment: 46 pages, 18 figures, title changed and some discussion added, accepted for publication in PR