Probing gluon distributions with $D^0$ production at the EicC

TL;DR

This paper discusses the design of a tracking system for the EicC to study gluon distributions via $D^0$ production, highlighting its potential to improve understanding of gluonic structures in nucleons and nuclei.

Contribution

It presents a conceptual design of a silicon and gaseous detector system enabling charm hadron reconstruction at EicC for gluon distribution studies.

Findings

Effective charm hadron reconstruction demonstrated

Significant impact on gluon PDFs at large x

Complementary to US-based Electron-Ion Collider programs

Abstract

The Electron-Ion Collider in China (EicC) has been proposed to study the inner structure of matter and fundamental laws of strong interactions. In this paper, we will present a conceptual design of the tracking system based on the state-of-art silicon detector and Micro-Pattern Gaseous Detector at the EicC and demonstrate that it will enable us to reconstruct charm hadron with good significance, hence study gluonic parton distribution functions in nucleons and nuclei, as well as gluon helicity distributions. The impact study using reweighting techniques shows that the impact of the EicC will be mainly in the large $x$ region. It complements similar physics programs at the Electron-Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory.