Probing nuclear gluons with heavy quarks at EIC

Abstract

We explore the feasibility of direct measurements of nuclear gluon densities using heavy-quark production (open charm, beauty) at a future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). We focus on the regions x > 0.3 (EMC effect) and x ~ 0.05-0.1 (antishadowing), where the nuclear modifications of the gluon density offer insight into non-nucleonic degrees of freedom and the QCD structure of nucleon-nucleon interactions. We describe the charm production rates and momentum distributions in nuclear deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) at large x_B, and comment on the possible methods for charm reconstruction using next-generation detectors at the EIC (pi/K identification, tracking, vertex detection).