Low Transverse Momentum Heavy Quark Pair Production to Probe Gluon Tomography

TL;DR

This paper establishes a theoretical framework for heavy quark pair production at low transverse momentum in deep inelastic scattering, enabling better probing of gluon distributions within protons.

Contribution

It derives the TMD factorization for heavy quark pair production in DIS at one-loop order, providing a foundation for gluon TMD phenomenology and extending to related processes.

Findings

Factorization demonstrated at one-loop order.

Hard factors calculated for different TMD schemes.

Framework applicable to other hard scattering processes.

Abstract

We derive the transverse momentum dependent (TMD) factorization for heavy quark pair production in deep inelastic scattering, where the total transverse momentum is much smaller than the invariant mass of the pair. The factorization is demonstrated at one-loop order, in both Ji-Ma-Yuan and Collins-11 schemes for the TMD definitions, and the hard factors are calculated accordingly. Our result provides a solid theoretical foundation for the phenomenological investigations of the gluon TMDs in this process, and can be extended to other similar hard processes, including dijet (di-hadron) production in DIS.