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

TL;DR

This paper presents the first detailed theoretical calculation of heavy meson production in electron-nucleus collisions at the future Electron-Ion Collider, incorporating advanced QCD corrections and nuclear effects to probe hadronization and energy transport.

Contribution

It introduces a novel formalism combining generalized DGLAP evolution and effective field theory methods to model heavy meson production in nuclear environments at the EIC.

Findings

Identifies optimal observables and energies for probing energy loss.

Quantifies cold nuclear matter effects on heavy meson cross sections.

Provides predictions to guide future experimental measurements.

Abstract

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. The comprehensive study summarized here allows us to identify the optimal observables, center-of-mass energies, and kinematic regions most sensitive to the physics of energy loss and hadronization at the EIC.