Open heavy flavor physics studies for the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC)

by Dr Xuan Li (LANL)

Monday 13 Oct 2025, 13:50 → 14:50 US/Eastern

604 (Nielsen)

Heavy flavor (charm and bottom) production is a unique probe for testing perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (pQCD). Due to their large 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 heavy flavor production an ideal probe for studying the transport properties of heavy quarks in different nuclear media and for exploring heavy quark hadronization processes. The future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will utilize high-luminosity, high-energy electron+proton ($e+p$) and electron+nucleus ($e+A$) collisions at various center-of-mass energies (29-141 GeV) to address several fundamental questions, including the hadronization mechanism. A series of heavy flavor hadron and jet physics studies have been carried out in standalone simulations using 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 heavy flavor physics projections will be compared with recent theoretical calculations, and we will discuss their implications for extracting flavor-dependent fragmentation functions and revealing the flavor-dependent parton energy loss mechanism in cold nuclear medium. In addition, a new project for a proposed fast Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor (MAPS) based tracker for the future EIC has been established by the DOE office of science and is co-lead by Los Alamos National Laboratory and University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The motivation and scope of this project will also be presented.