Probing Gluon Dynamics and Hadronization with Heavy Flavor Production at Future Electron Ion Collider
Heavy flavor quarks, due to their large external masses, are produced predominantly through initial hard scatterings involving gluons in high energy e+p/A or hadron collisions. Therefore they carry unique sensitivity to understand QCD emergent properties of hot QGP medium as well as cold nucleon and nucleus structures. Measurement of heavy flavor hadron production also offer new insights into the hadronization and the potential modifications due to the cold/hot medium created in these collisions. With high luminosity e+p/A collision data provided by the Electron Ion Collider (EIC), future experiments allow us to investigate in detail gluon dynamics in nucleon and nucleus as well as the QCD hadronization.
In this talk, we will present physics simulation studies on heavy flavor production utilizing the silicon tracker at future EIC experiments. The studies we focus on include 1) inclusive heavy flavor hadron production in unpolarized e+p/A collisions to constrain gluon (nuclear) parton distribution functions in nucleons and nuclei; 2) the heavy flavor hadrochemistry to understand heavy quark hadronization as well as the impact of cold nuclear matter effects in e+A collisions. In addition, measurements of heavy flavor production in polarized e+p collisions can offer constraints to the spin dependent gluon distributions longitudinally and transversely. Finally, we will discuss the requirements to the detector in future EIC experiments in order to achieve the physics goals from these measurements.
