Heavy flavor jet production and substructure in electron-nucleus collisions

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.

Snowmass 2021 White Paper: Electron Ion Collider for High Energy Physics

“…[314,315] for recent reviews. Related observables have recently been proposed at the EIC to probe interesting aspects of perturbative QCD, hadronization, cold nuclear matter effects and gluon saturation [359,[371][372][373][374][375][376][377][378][379] in eA collisions. A frequently studied class of observables are jet angularities which characterizes the radiation pattern inside jets [380,381].…”

“…This approach introduces a new mass scale that modifies the structure of parton showers and must be carefully accounted for in perturbative calculations. Progress in the framework of SCET with Glauber gluon interactions have allowed for the first calculation of inclusive charm-jet and bottom-jet cross sections in electron-nucleus collisions at next-to-leading order [375]. Furthermore, predictions for the heavy flavor-tagged jet momentum sharing distributions to further clarify the correlated in-medium modification of jet substructure [500].…”

“…Recently, examples of first calculations of semi-inclusive charm-quark jet and bottom-quark jet production and substructure in e+A relative to e+p collisions at the EIC have appeared in the literature [375,501]. The formalism described here allowed for the determinatino of NLO-level results by consistently combining the parton level cross sections and semi-inclusive jet functions up to NLO.…”