Speaker
Description
The proposed Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will utilize high-luminosity high-energy electron+proton ($e+p$) and electron+nucleus ($e+A$) collisions at different center of mass energies to solve several fundamental questions in the nuclear physics field. Due to their high masses ($M_{c,b} > \Lambda_{QCD}$), heavy quarks are produced early in hard partonic scatterings and their flavors are preserved once produced. This feature makes the heavy flavor product an ideal probe to study the transport properties of heavy quarks inside different nuclear media and to explore the heavy quark hadronization processes. A series of heavy flavor hadron and jet physics studies have been carried out in standalone simulations with parameterized EIC detector performance. We will present the projected nuclear modifications of heavy flavor jets and heavy flavor hadrons inside jets in $e+p$ and $e+A$ collisions at different center of mass energies with the projected integrated luminosities at the EIC. These EIC heavy flavor physics projections will be compared with recent theoretical calculations and we will discuss their impacts in extracting the flavor dependent fragmentation functions and revealing the flavor dependent parton energy loss mechanism in cold nuclear medium. These future EIC studies are expected to help constraining the initial- and final-state effects for similar measurements in $p+p$, $p+$A and A+Au collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
