[Submitted on 21 Jul 2020] (cross-list from hep-ph)
Heavy meson tomography of cold nuclear matter at the electron-ion collider
Hai Tao Li🇺🇸 · Ze Long Liu🇺🇸 · Ivan Vitev🇺🇸
An important part of the physics program at the future electron-ion collider is to understand the nature of hadronization and the transport of energy and matter in large nuclei. Open heavy flavor production in deep inelastic scattering provides a new tool to address these critical questions. We present the first calculation of D-mesons and B-meson cross sections in electron-nucleus collisions at the EIC by including both next-to-leading order QCD corrections and cold nuclear matter effects. Our formalism employs generalized DGLAP evolution to include the contribution of in-medium parton showers, and is based on methods developed in soft-collinear effective theory with Glauber gluons that describe inclusive hadron production in reactions with nucleons and nuclei. The comprehensive study summarized here allows us to identify the optimal observables, center-of-mass energies, and kinematic regions most sensitive to the physics of energy loss and hadronization at the EIC.
- Comments:
- 11 pages, 6 figures, 1 table, v2: journal version. Figure panels, references, and discussion added
- Subjects:
- High Energy Physics — Phenomenology (hep-ph); High Energy Physics — Experiment (hep-ex); Nuclear Theory (nucl-th)
- arXiv:
- 2007.10994 [pdf]