Quark Matter 2023

Exploration of hadronization through heavy flavor production at the future Electron-Ion Collider

6 Sept 2023, 12:20

20m

Ballroom B (Hilton of the Americas)

Oral Spin/EIC physics Spin/EIC Physics

Speaker

Xuan Li (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

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. Due to their high masses ($M_{c,b}>{\mathrm{\Lambda }}_{QCD}$), 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, which is referred to as the heavy quark hadronization. A series of heavy flavor hadron and jet simulation studies have been carried out with the newly developed EIC project detector conceptual designs. We will present reconstructed heavy flavor hadron mass and heavy flavor jet 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 with the EIC project detector design and the projected integrated luminosities at the EIC. These proposed EIC heavy flavor measurements will provide a unique path to explore the flavor dependent fragmentation functions and reveal the heavy quark nuclear transport properties in cold nuclear medium. The expected results will provide great discriminating power in separating different theoretical calculations and help constraining initial and final state effects for heavy ion measurements at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Presentation materials

QM2023_EIC_XuanLi_v4.pdf

Peer reviewing

Paper

Accepted on 13 Feb 2024 by Frank Geurts

QM23_XuanLi.pdf