Abstract
An important part of the physics program of 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.
Highlights
A high-luminosity electron-ion collider (EIC), which recently received mission need approval from the US Department of Energy, can address fundamental questions about nucleons and nuclei
The effect is most pronounced at forward rapidities and we find that RheA as a function of z is a more suitable observable for cold nuclear matter tomography at the EIC than the transverse momentum distributions’ modification for hadrons in the laboratory frame alone
The much higher CM energies relative to HERMES and, correspondingly, larger parent parton energies in the rest frame of the nucleus boost hadron formation times. This motivates a detailed theoretical study of in-medium effects arising from finalstate parton-level interactions inside large nuclei
Summary
The possibility to study the physics of hadronization and energy loss of partons in cold nuclear matter has been investigated by the HERMES Collaboration at HERA using fixed nuclear targets and an electron beam of energy Ebeam = 27.6 GeV [5, 6, 7] In these experiments suppression of the multiplicities of light hadrons in e+A versus e+p collisions has been clearly established. Fundamentally different assumptions about the time scales involved in the process of hadronization and the nature of nuclear attenuation - inelastic parton scattering versus hadron absorption - give good description of the light meson multiplicities’ quenching [13, 15] With this in mind, we turn to open heavy meson production as a new probe of cold nuclear matter effects at the EIC, where the semi-inclusive cross sections can be readily measured.
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