ar X iv : h ep - p h / 01 04 25 2 v 1 2 4 A pr 2 00 1 ADP - 01 - 15 / T 450 LTH ? ? Electron - Nucleus Collisions at THERA

The nuclear option at THERA provides an ideal and unique opportunity to investigate the black body limit (BBL) of high energy Deep Inelastic Scattering of highly virtual photons off heavy nuclear targets and thereby probe QCD in a new regime. At high enough energies, whichever hadronic configuration the photon fluctuates into, the interaction at a given impact parameter with the heavy nuclear target will eventually reach its geometrical limit corresponding to the scattering from a black disk. An attractive feature of the BBL regime for a large nucleus is that the interaction is strong although the coupling constant is small. Predictions for longitudinal and transverse distributions of the leading hadrons in inclusive and diffractive channels and exclusive vector meson production are found to be strikingly different in BBL