Probing the helicity structure of the nucleon at the EIC and EicC

by Daniele Paolo Anderle (South China Normal University)

Monday 3 Oct 2022, 11:30 → 12:30 Europe/Zurich

U2-04 (University of Milan Bicocca)

With the exciting time of the Electron Ion Collider machines coming, phenomenological studies investigating the potentials of such apparatuses have become an essential tool in order to steer and plan future research efforts of the nuclear and particle physics community. At the time being, two machines are planned to be build in the near future: the Electron Ion Collider in the US (EIC) and the Electron Ion Collider in China (EicC). They are planned to be high luminosity machines able to cover together a large complementary part of the available phase space, breaching the gap between the existing high energy machines (e.g. LHC) and lower energy machines (e.g. JLAB). Both the EIC and the EicC have been shown to be able to potentially impact a great deal of physics. In particular, they both share common research goals such as the investigation of the spin structure of the nucleon, the investigation of nuclear effects and the investigation of the origin of the nucleon mass.
In this talk I will present two impact studies exploring the helicity structure of the nucleon at the EIC/EicC. For the first study we have used simulations of inclusive and semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering (DIS/SIDIS) on proton and effective neutron targets in order to determine the effects of future EicC DIS/SIDIS data on the extraction of helicity distributions. We observed great potential of the EicC in constraining the uncertainties of the distributions in the so-called “see-quark” region. In the second study, we have investigated the potential of tagged heavy flavour production at the EIC in constraining the gluon helicity distribution at mid-high x values. The two studies demonstrate the effectiveness and the complementarity of the two machines in pinning down specific regions of the helicity distributions, which has become essential in order to further our understanding of the spin structure of the nucleon.