We extend the theory of leading twist nuclear shadowing to calculate leading twist nuclear
diffractive parton distribution functions (nDPDFs). We observe that the quark and gluon nPDFs have different patterns of the
A-dependence. It is found that the probability of diffraction in the quark channel increases with
A, reaching about
30% at
x10−4 for
A200, and weakly decreases with
Q2. In the gluon channel, the probability of diffraction is large for all nuclei (
40%for heavy nuclei at
x10−4 and
Q024 GeV
2), it weakly depends on
A and it decreases rather fast with increasing
Q2—the probability decreases by approximately a factor of two as
Q2 changes from 4 GeV
2 to 100 GeV
2. We also find that nuclear shadowing breaks down Regge factorization of nDPDFs, which is satisfied experimentally in the nucleon case. All these novel effects in nDPDFs are large enough to be straightforwardly measured in ultraperipheral collisions at the LHC.