Coherent production of hard dijets on nuclei in QCD

We formulate the perturbative QCD approach to coherent diffractive dijet production in pion-nucleon and pion-nucleus collisions at high energy. For hard dijets the Pomeron splitting mechanism in which both helicity amplitudes are proportional to the unintegrated gluon structure function of the proton and the pion distribution amplitude is shown to dominate. In nuclear diffraction multiple Pomeron splitting components are found to give antishadowing contributions at large jet momentum. To leading twist there is an exact cancelation of effects of nuclear attenuation and antishadowing/broadening of multiple Pomeron splitting contributions. The next-to-leading higher twist correction driven by nuclear rescatterings is calculable in hard QCD and proves to be numerically very large. We argue that large higher twist effects do not preclude the determination of gross features of the pion distribution amplitude. Our results on the atomic mass number and momentum dependence of dijet cross sections agree well with the preliminary findings from the E791 experiment.