Systematics of strong nuclear amplification of gluon saturation from exclusive vector meson production in high energy electron-nucleus collisions

We show that gluon saturation gives rise to a strong modification of the scaling in both the nuclear mass number A and the virtuality Q(2) of the vector meson production cross-section in exclusive deep inelastic scattering off nuclei. We present qualitative analytic expressions for how the scaling exponents are modified as well as quantitative predictions that can be tested at an Electron-Ion Collider. (C) 2018 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.