Search

Dihadron semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering (SIDIS) of 10.6 GeV longitudinally polarized electrons off the proton has been measured using the CLAS12 detector at Jefferson Lab. Two separate channels, $\pi^+\pi^0$ and $\pi^-\pi^0$, were analyzed, requiring the reconstruction of diphoton pairs. In this analysis, we addressed the problem of false neutral particles being reconstructed by CLAS12's event builder, polluting the otherwise physical combinatorial background underneath the $\pi^0$ peak. A photon classifier using a Gradient Boosted Trees (GBTs) architecture was trained with Monte Carlo simulations to reduce the amount of background $\pi^0$'s. We show that the nearest-neighbor features learned by the model lead to a substantial increase in signal vs. background discrimination compared to previous CLAS12 $\pi^0$ analyses. The machine learning approach recovers several times more dihadron statistics for the dataset.

It is already known from phenomenological studies that in exclusive deep-inelastic scattering off nuclei there appears to be a scaling behavior of vector meson production cross section in both nuclear mass number, $A$, and photon virtuality, $Q^{2}$, which is strongly modified due to gluon saturation effects. In this work we continue those studies in a realistic setup based upon using the Monte Carlo event generator Sar{\em t}re. We make quantitative predictions for the kinematics of the Electron-Ion Collider, focusing on this $A$ and $Q^{2}$ scaling picture, along with establishing a small region of squared momentum transfer, $t$, where there are signs of this scaling that may potentially be observed at the EIC. Our results are represented as pseudo-data of vector meson production diffractive cross section and/or their ratios, which are obtained by parsing data collected by the event generator through smearing functions, emulating the proposed detector resolutions for the future EIC., Comment: 26 pages and 18 figures