Exclusive diffractive processes in electron-ion collisions.

We present a new technique to calculate the cross section for diffractive vector meson production and deeply virtual Compton scattering (DVCS) in electron-ion collisions based on the dipole model. The measurement of these processes can provide valuable information on nonlinear QCD phenomena, such as gluon saturation, and is the the only known way to gain insight into the spatial distribution of gluons in nuclei. We present predictions of differential cross-section distribution dσ/dQ² and dσ/dt for J/ψ and φ meson production for diffractive processes of heavy nuclei, and demonstrate the feasibility of extracting the gluon source distribution of heavy nuclei, F(b), from coherent diffraction. We briefly introduce a new event generator based on our method that can be used for studying exclusive diffractive processes at a future electron-ion collider. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]