Revealing the black-body regime of small-x deep-inelastic scattering through final-state signals - art. no. 192301

We derive the major characteristics of inclusive and diffractive final stat es in deep-inelastic scattering off heavy nuclei for the high-energy (small -x) kinematics in which the limit of complete absorption is reached for the dominant hadronic fluctuations in the virtual photon (the black-body limit of the process), Both the longitudinal and transverse distributions of the leading hadrons are found to be strikingly different from the correspondin g ones within the leading-twist approximation, and hence provide unambiguou s signals for the onset of the black-body limit.