Exploration of hadronization through heavy flavor production at the future Electron-Ion Collider

Abstract

The future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), which is expected to start construction at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 2025, will utilize high-luminosity high-energy electron+proton and electron+nucleus collisions to explore several fundamental questions in the high energy and nuclear physics fields. Exploring how matter is formed from quarks and gluons, which is referred to as the hadronization process, is one of the EIC science objectives. The EIC project detector design led by the ePIC collaboration can realize a series of high precision heavy flavor hadron and jet measurements. Heavy flavor jet substructure and heavy flavor hadrons inside jets, which can provide direct information about the heavy quark hadronization process, have been studied in simulation for electron+proton and electron+nucleus collisions at EIC. The associated physics projections and comparison with latest theoretical calculations will be presented.