Abstract
We study the potential of dijet photoproduction measurements at a future electron-ion collider (EIC) to better constrain our present knowledge of the nuclear parton distribution functions. Based on theoretical calculations at next-to-leading order and approximate next-to-next-to-leading order of perturbative QCD, we establish the kinematic reaches for three different EIC designs, the size of the parton density function modifications for four different light and heavy nuclei from He-4 over C-12 and Fe-56 to Pb-208 with respect to the free proton, and the improvement of EIC measurements with respect to current determinations from deep-inelastic scattering and Drell-Yan data alone and when also considering data from existing hadron colliders.
Highlights
Our present knowledge about the structure of hadrons at high energies is mostly encoded in parton density functions (PDFs)
Since only the evolution of these quantities with the energy scale Q can be calculated in perturbative QCD, but not their dependence on the longitudinal parton momentum fraction x, they are generally fitted to experimental data using factorization theorems and calculations of the Wilson coefficients at next-to-leading order (NLO) and beyond [1]
We present the kinematic reach of dijet photoproduction for three different currently discussed configurations of the electron-ion collider (EIC), discuss the size of nuclear effects to be expected for different light and heavy nuclei, estimate the improvement in sensitivity on the nuclear PDF (nPDF) from the EIC with respect to current uncertainties, and establish the size of the gluon contribution in the heavy nucleus and of direct vs resolved contributions in the photon
Summary
Our present knowledge about the structure of hadrons at high energies is mostly encoded in parton density functions (PDFs). Full NNLO calculations of inclusive jet [23] and dijet production [24] in DIS are available They confirm the aNNLO results even at surprisingly large distances from the hadronic threshold and show that the NNLO corrections are moderate in size, except at the kinematical edges, and that their inclusion leads to a substantial reduction of the scale variation uncertainty on the predictions. We present the kinematic reach of dijet photoproduction for three different currently discussed configurations of the EIC, discuss the size of nuclear effects to be expected for different light and heavy nuclei, estimate the improvement in sensitivity on the nPDFs from the EIC with respect to current uncertainties, and establish the size of the gluon contribution in the heavy nucleus and of direct vs resolved contributions in the photon.
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