Coherence effects in diffractive electroproduction from nuclei

Abstract

We argue that study of the cross section of coherent photo(electro) production of ρ, ρ ′ , ...-mesons provides an effective method to probe onset of black body limit(BBL) in the soft and hard QCD interactions. We illustrate the expected features of the onset of BBL using generalized vector dominance model(GVDM). We show that this model describes very well ρ-meson coherent photoproduction at 6 ≤ E γ ≤ 10 GeV. The advantages of the process of coherent dijet production and hard diffractive processes in general for probing the onset of BBL and measuring the light-cone wave function of the photon in a hard scattering regime where decomposition over twists becomes inapplicable are explained. We argue also that the regime of color fluctuations manifests itself at intermediate energies in exclusive and semiexclusive photoproduction of vector mesons and that the color transparency(CT) should reveal itself in these processes at Q 2 of the order of a few GeV 2 .