Hot spots in a proton

¹ Department of Physics, P.O. Box 35, 40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland
² Helsinki Institute of Physics, P.O. Box 64, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
³ Fakultät für Physik, Universität Bielefeld, D-33615 Bielefeld, Germany

^* e-mail: tuomas.v.v.lappi@jyu.fi

Published online: 26 June 2024

Abstract

We explore the consequences of gluonic hot spots inside the proton for the initial eccentricities in a proton-nucleus collision, and the constraints on the parameters describing these hot spots from coherent and incoherent exclusive vector meson production cross sections in deep inelastic scattering. We show that geometric fluctuations of hot spots inside the proton are the dominant source of eccentricity whereas color charge fluctuations only give a negligible correction. We find that the coherent cross section is sensitive to both the size of the target and the structure of the probe. The incoherent cross section is dominated by color fluctuations at small transverse momentum transfer |t|, by proton and hot spot sizes as well as the structure of the probe at medium |t| and again by color fluctuations at large |t|.