Neutral-Current Electroweak Physics and SMEFT Studies at the EIC

Abstract

We study the potential for precision electroweak (EW) measurements and beyond-the-Standard Model (BSM) searches using cross-section asymmetries in neutral-current (NC) deep inelastic scattering at the electron-ion collider (EIC). Our analysis uses a complete and realistic accounting of systematic errors from both theory and experiment and considers the potential of both proton and deuteron beams for a wide range of energies and luminosities. We also consider what can be learned from a possible future positron beam and a potential ten-fold luminosity upgrade of the EIC beyond its initial decade of running. We use the SM effective field theory (SMEFT) framework to parameterize BSM effects and focus on semi-leptonic four-fermion operators, whereas for our precision EW study, we determine how well the EIC can measure the weak mixing angle. New features of our study include the use of an up-to-date detector design of EIC Comprehensive Chromodynamics Experiment (ECCE) and accurate running conditions of the EIC, the simultaneous fitting of beam polarization uncertainties and Wilson coefficients to improve the sensitivity to SMEFT operators, and the inclusion of the weak mixing angle running in our fit template. We find that the EIC can probe BSM operators at scales competitive with and in many cases exceeding LHC Drell-Yan bounds while simultaneously not suffering from degeneracies between Wilson coefficients.

67 pages, 66 figures

References in corpus (4)

• LHAPDF6: parton density access in the LHC precision era
• Parton distributions in the LHC era: MMHT 2014 PDFs
• A first unbiased global determination of polarized PDFs and their uncertainties
• Precision Measurement of the Weak Charge of the Proton

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Snowmass 2021 whitepaper: Proton structure at the precision frontier
• Exploring the SMEFT at dimension-8 with Drell-Yan transverse momentum measurements
• Heavy Neutral Leptons at the Electron-Ion Collider
• Transverse spin asymmetries at the EIC as a probe of anomalous electric and magnetic dipole moments
• Renormalization-group running of dimension-8 four-fermion operators in the SMEFT
• Neutrino Electromagnetic Properties and the Weak Mixing Angle at the LHC Forward Physics Facility
• Deep-Inelastic Scattering at TeV Energies with LHC Muons
• Testing Lepton Flavor Universality at the Electron-Ion Collider
• Probing top-quark electroweak couplings indirectly at the Electron-Ion Collider
• Making the $\mu$OST of the Muon Collider