Onset of gluon saturation through incoherent J/$\psi$ production at large $|t|$

Abstract

In this contribution we predict the possibility of detecting signatures of the long-sought saturation in ultraperipheral heavy-ion collisions at currently accessible energies of the LHC. To probe these effects, we study incoherent vector meson production, which is sensitive to fluctuations in the partonic structure of the target. The energy-dependent hotspot model, formulated within the color dipole approach, incorporates subnucleonic degrees of freedom known as hotspots.  Within this framework, we study the energy dependence of incoherent photoproduction of vector mesons in diffractive processes at various values of the Mandelstam-$|t|$ variable. Since $|t|$  is related to the transverse distribution of color charges, analyzing its energy dependence within specific ranges allows us to isolate fluctuations across different size scales, highlighting the hotspot contributions where saturation is expected.