A New Heavy Flavor Program for the Future Electron-Ion Collider

Understand

The proposed high-energy and high-luminosity Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will provide one of the cleanest environments to precisely determine the nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs) in a wide $x$-$Q^{2}$ range.

• Heavy flavor production at the EIC provides access to nPDFs in the poorly constrained high Bjorken-$x$ region, allows us to study the quark and gluon fragmentation processes, and constrains parton energy loss in cold nuclear matter.
• Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory are developing a new physics program to study heavy flavor production, flavor tagged jets, and heavy flavor hadron-jet correlations in the nucleon/nucleus going direction at the future EIC.
• The proposed measurements will provide a unique way to explore the flavor dependent fragmentation functions and energy loss in a heavy nucleus.