Lepton scattering is an established ideal tool for studying inner structure of small particles such as nucleons as well as nuclei. As a future high energy nuclear physics project, an Electron-ion collider in China (EicC) has been proposed. It will be constructed based on an upgraded heavy-ion accelerator, High Intensity heavy-ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF) which is currently under construction, together with a new electron ring. The proposed collider will provide highly polarized electrons (with a polarization of ∼80%) and protons (with a polarization of ∼70%) with variable center of mass energies from 15 to 20 GeV and the luminosity of (2–3) × 1033 cm−2 · s−1. Polarized deuterons and Helium-3, as well as unpolarized ion beams from Carbon to Uranium, will be also available at the EicC.The main foci of the EicC will be precision measurements of the structure of the nucleon in the sea quark region, including 3D tomography of nucleon; the partonic structure of nuclei and the parton interaction with the nuclear environment; the exotic states, especially those with heavy flavor quark contents. In addition, issues fundamental to understanding the origin of mass could be addressed by measurements of heavy quarkonia near-threshold production at the EicC. In order to achieve the above-mentioned physics goals, a hermetical detector system will be constructed with cutting-edge technologies.This document is the result of collective contributions and valuable inputs from experts across the globe. The EicC physics program complements the ongoing scientific programs at the Jefferson Laboratory and the future EIC project in the United States. The success of this project will also advance both nuclear and particle physics as well as accelerator and detector technology in China.

We present a first analysis of parton-to-pion fragmentation functions at next-to-next-to-leading order accuracy in QCD based on single-inclusive pion production in electron-positron annihilation. Special emphasis is put on the technical details necessary to perform the QCD scale evolution and cross section calculation in Mellin moment space. We demonstrate how the description of the data and the theoretical uncertainties are improved when next-to-next-to-leading order QCD corrections are included.

We investigate the resummation of large logarithmic perturbative corrections to hadron production in electron-positron annihilation and semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering. We find modest, but significant, enhancements of hadron multiplicities in the kinematic regimes accessible in present high-precision experiments. Our results are therefore relevant for the determination of hadron fragmentation functions from data for these processes.

We present a novel global QCD analysis of charged D Ã -meson fragmentation functions at next-toleading order accuracy. This is achieved by making use of the available data for single-inclusive D Ã -meson production in electron-positron annihilation, hadron-hadron collisions, and, for the first time, in-jet fragmentation in proton-proton scattering. It is shown how to include all relevant processes efficiently and without approximations within the Mellin moment technique, specifically for the in-jet fragmentation cross section. The presented technical framework is generic and can be straightforwardly applied to future analyses of fragmentation functions for other hadron species, as soon as more in-jet fragmentation data become available. We choose to work within the zero mass variable flavor number scheme which is applicable for sufficiently high energies and transverse momenta. The obtained optimum set of parton-to-D Ã fragmentation functions is accompanied by Hessian uncertainty sets which allow one to propagate hadronization uncertainties to other processes of interest.

We study the link between parton dynamics in the collinear limit and the logarithmically enhanced terms of the groomed jet mass distribution, for jets groomed with the modified mass-drop tagger (mMDT). While the leading-logarithmic (LL) result is linked to collinear evolution with leading-order splitting kernels, here we derive the NLL structure directly from triple-collinear splitting kernels. The calculation we present is a fixed-order calculation in the triple-collinear limit, independent of resummation ingredients and methods. It therefore constitutes a powerful cross-check of the NLL results previously derived using the SCET formalism and provides much of the insight needed for resummation within the traditional QCD approach.