Do diffractive dijets reveal hidden momentum structure in nuclei?

When photons knock two jets out of atomic nuclei in ultra-peripheral collisions, the jets rarely point directly away from each other. By measuring this acoplanarity at the LHC and future electron-ion collider, researchers can extract properties of diffractive partons—the constituent particles that don't interact normally. The calculation accounts for quantum corrections across all energy scales, making predictions testable at existing experiments.