Probing the jet transport coefficient of cold nuclear matter in electron-ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how cold nuclear matter affects particle transverse momentum in electron-ion collisions, using a higher-twist QCD framework and a kinematic-dependent jet transport coefficient to predict measurable effects at future EIC experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a global analysis of the jet transport coefficient $\

Findings

Significant kinematic and color-state dependences predicted.

Future EIC measurements can constrain the transport coefficient.

Provides a community-accessible $\

Abstract

We present a study of the nuclear-medium induced transverse momentum broadening of particle production in future electron-ion-collision~(EIC) experiments. By considering the multiple scattering between hard partons and cold nuclear medium within the higher-twist factorization framework in perturbative QCD, we calculate the transverse momentum broadening of single hadron production in semi-inclusive measurements, as well as the nuclear enhancement of the transverse momentum imbalance for di-hadron and heavy-meson pair productions. In particular, a kinematics dependent non-perturbative jet transport coefficient $\hat q=\hat q(x,Q^2)$ extracted in a global analysis of the current data, together with its uncertainty determined with a Hessian method, are input into our calculations and are available for the community. Significant kinematic and color-state dependences of the nuclear induced broadening/imbalance are predicted. Our results indicate that the future EIC measurements are able to provide powerful constraints on the kinematic dependence of the transport coefficient $\hat q$ and thus greatly facilitate the jet tomography of cold nuclear medium.