Heavy meson tomography of cold nuclear matter at the electron-ion collider

Understand

An important part of the physics program at the future electron-ion collider is to understand the nature of hadronization and the transport of energy and matter in large nuclei.

• Open heavy flavor production in deep inelastic scattering provides a new tool to address these critical questions.
• We present the first calculation of D-mesons and B-meson cross sections in electron-nucleus collisions at the EIC by including both next-to-leading order QCD corrections and cold nuclear matter effects.
• Our formalism employs generalized DGLAP evolution to include the contribution of in-medium parton showers, and is based on methods developed in soft-collinear effective theory with Glauber gluons that describe inclusive hadron production in reactions with nucleons and nuclei.