  As Glauber has shown in 1959, the spin-flip phenomena caused by the
conventional spin-orbit interaction do vanish in the scattering off heavy,
strongly absorbing nuclei. On the other hand, the origin of the s-channel
helicity nonconservation (SCHNC) in diffractive DIS is of the origin different
from simple spin-orbit interaction, and here we demonstrate that SCHNC in
vector meson production survives strong absorption effects in nuclear targets.
The intranuclear absorption often discussed in terms of the saturation effects
introduces a new large scale $Q_A^2$ into the calculation of diffractive vector
meson production amplitudes. Based on the color dipole approach, we show how
the impact of the saturation scale $Q_A^2$ changes from the coherent to
incoherent/quasifree diffractive vector mesons.

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology