Could saturation effects be visible in a future electron–ion collider?

Abstract We expect to observe parton saturation in a future electron–ion collider. In this Letter we discuss this expectation in more detail considering two different models which are in good agreement with the existing experimental data on nuclear structure functions. In particular, we study the predictions of saturation effects in electron–ion collisions at high energies, using a generalization for nuclear targets of the b-CGC model, which describes the ep HERA quite well. We estimate the total, longitudinal and charm structure functions in the dipole picture and compare them with the predictions obtained using collinear factorization and modern sets of nuclear parton distributions. Our results show that inclusive observables are not very useful in the search for saturation effects. In the small x region they are very difficult to disentangle from the predictions of the collinear approaches. This happens mainly because of the large uncertainties in the determination of the nuclear parton distribution functions. On the other hand, our results indicate that the contribution of diffractive processes to the total cross section is about 20% at large A and small Q 2 , allowing for a detailed study of diffractive observables. The study of diffractive processes becomes essential to observe parton saturation.