Constraints on Gluon Distribution Functions in the Nucleon and Nucleus from Open Charm Hadron Production at the Electron-Ion Collider

Abstract

The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory will be a precision Quantum Chromodynamics machine that will enable a vast physics program with electron+proton/ion collisions across a broad center-of-mass range. Measurements of hard probes such as heavy flavor in deep inelastic scatterings will be an essential component to the EIC physics program and are one of the detector R\&D driving aspects. In this paper we study the projected statistical precision of open charm hadron production through exclusive hadronic channel reconstruction with a silicon detector concept currently being developed using a PYTHIA-based simulation. We further study the impact of possible intrinsic charm in the proton on projected data, and estimate the constraint on the nuclear gluon parton distribution function (PDF) from the charm structure functions $F_2^{c\overline{c}}$ in $e$+Au collisions using a Bayesian PDF re-weighting technique. Our studies show the EIC will be capable delivering an unprecedented measurement of charm hadron production across a broad kinematic region and will provide strong constraints to both intrinsic charm and nuclear gluon PDFs.

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Nuclear PDFs After the First Decade of LHC Data
• Strong Interaction Physics at the Luminosity Frontier with 22 GeV Electrons at Jefferson Lab
• Impact of Inclusive Electron Ion Collider Data on Collinear Parton Distributions
• Probing gluon TMDs with reconstructed and tagged heavy flavor hadron pairs at EIC