Speaker
Description
Heavy quark production in deep inelastic scattering receives a large contribution from the Photon Gluon Fusion process and thus provides a valuable tool to constrain the gluon distributions inside the nucleon/ion probed. Measurements of heavy flavor production can significantly improve the constraints on nuclear gluon distribution functions and gluon polarization in protons. Heavy flavor hadron pair measurements can offer direct constraints on the Transverse Momentum Dependent gluon distributions (gluon TMDs) in protons. Recent studies also propose heavy flavor hadrons as a sensitive probe to study the hadronization mechanism.
In this talk, we will present physics simulation studies of heavy flavor hadron measurements at the future EIC utilizing a silicon tracker with configuration optimized for the ATHENA detector. These studies include projections for heavy quark production with polarized and unpolarized beams to constrain gluon distribution functions in protons and ions. Heavy flavor pair production is studied through explicit reconstruction of heavy flavor hadron decays and a heavy flavor tagging algorithm utilizing displaced vertex, to constrain gluon TMDs. We show that the tagging algorithm provides good purity for heavy flavor pair reconstruction and significantly improves statistical uncertainty projections. We will also discuss prospects of utilizing heavy flavor hadron measurements to study hadronization and also the impact of detector and luminosity requirements on all these measurements
| Submitted on behalf of a Collaboration? | Yes |
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