Speaker
Description
The proposed Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will utilize high-luminosity high-energy electron+proton ($e+p$) and electron+nucleus ($e+A$) collisions to solve several fundamental questions including searching for gluon saturation and studying the proton/nuclear structure. Advanced detector technologies, such as the low material budget fine spatial resolution Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor (MAPS), will enable high precision heavy flavor hadron and jet measurements at the future EIC. Due to their high masses ($M_{c,b} > \Lambda_{QCD}$), heavy quarks do not transfer into other quarks or gluons once they are produced. This feature makes the heavy flavor product an ideal probe to explore how a heavy flavor hadron is formed from a heavy flavor quark, the heavy quark hadronization. A series of heavy flavor hadron and jet simulation studies have been carried out with the newly developed analysis framework, which consists of the event generation in PYTHIA, detector performance of recent EIC detector conceptual designs, QCD and beam remanent background embedding. We will present reconstructed heavy flavor hadron and jet mass (transverse momentum) spectrums, the projected nuclear modifications of heavy flavor hadrons inside jets, and heavy flavor jet substructure distributions in $e+p$ and $e+A$ collisions. These proposed EIC heavy flavor measurements will provide a unique path to constrain the accessed gluon parton distribution functions within the high Bjorken-x ($x_{BJ} > 0.1$) region, explore the flavor dependent fragmentation functions and heavy quark nuclear transport properties in nuclear meidum, which can constrain the initial and final state effects for previous and ongoing heavy ion measurements at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
