Heavy flavor jet production and substructure in electron-nucleus collisions

TL;DR

This paper presents the first NLO calculations of heavy flavor jet production and substructure modifications in electron-nucleus collisions, providing insights into nuclear matter and jet quenching effects.

Contribution

It introduces a novel theoretical framework for calculating heavy flavor jet cross sections and substructure in electron-nucleus collisions, accounting for mass effects and medium modifications.

Findings

First NLO calculations of charm and bottom jet cross sections in electron-nucleus collisions.

Predictions for heavy flavor-tagged jet substructure modifications in nuclear medium.

Comparison with electron-proton case highlights nuclear effects on jet formation.

Abstract

Deep inelastic scattering on nuclei at the Electron-Ion Collider will open new opportunities to investigate the structure of matter. Heavy flavor-tagged jets are complementary probes of the partonic composition and transport coefficients of large nuclei, but introduce a new mass scale that modifies the structure of parton showers and must be carefully accounted for in perturbative calculations. In the framework of soft-collinear effective theory with Glauber gluon interactions, we present the first calculation of inclusive charm-jet and bottom-jet cross sections in electron-nucleus collisions at next-to-leading order and compare them to the reference electron-proton case. We also show predictions for the heavy flavor-tagged jet momentum sharing distributions to further clarify the correlated in-medium modification of jet substructure.