Towards the Precision Determination of PDFs and Fragmentation Functions Using EIC Projections

by Hamzeh Khanpour (AGH)

Thursday 26 Jun 2025, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Warsaw

The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will offer unprecedented opportunities to explore the internal structure of hadrons with high precision. In this talk, we present a comprehensive study of the EIC’s impact on the global determination of unpolarized and polarized parton distribution functions (PDFs), as well as fragmentation functions (FFs). Using state-of-the-art simulated inclusive deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) and semi-inclusive DIS (SIDIS) processes, we evaluate the projected improvements in quark and gluon distributions, particularly in the small-𝑥 region. We demonstrate how the EIC will significantly reduce uncertainties in key distributions such as the gluon density and strange-quark helicities, and enable robust flavor separation through SIDIS with identified hadrons (π±, K±). Finally, we compare the EIC's projected impact across recent global analyses and highlight the critical role of FF precision in enabling the extraction of polarized PDFs from SIDIS data.