Heavy flavor jet production and substructure in electron-nucleus collisions

Abstract

Deep inelastic scattering on nuclei at the Electron-Ion Collider will open new opportunities to investigate the structure of matter. Heavy flavor-tagged jets are complementary probes of the partonic composition and transport coefficients of large nuclei, but introduce a new mass scale that modifies the structure of parton showers and must be carefully accounted for in perturbative calculations. In the framework of soft-collinear effective theory with Glauber gluon interactions, we present the first calculation of inclusive charm-jet and bottom-jet cross sections in electron-nucleus collisions at next-to-leading order and compare them to the reference electron-proton case. We also show predictions for the heavy flavor-tagged jet momentum sharing distributions to further clarify the correlated in-medium modification of jet substructure.