Neutron spin structure from e-He-3 scattering with double spectator tagging at the electron-ion collider

The spin structure function of the neutron is traditionally determined by measuring the spin asymmetry of inclusive electron deep inelastic scattering (DIS) off polarized He-3 nuclei. In such experiments, nuclear corrections are significant and must be treated carefully in the interpretation of experimental data. Here we study the feasibility of suppressing model dependencies by tagging both spectator protons in the process of DIS off neutrons in He-3 at the forthcoming Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). This allows for a reconstruction of the momentum of the struck neutron to ensure it was nearly at rest in the initial state, thereby reducing sensitivity to nuclear corrections and suppressing contributions from electron DIS off protons in He-3. Using realistic accelerator and detector configurations, we demonstrate that the EIC can probe the neutron spin structure from x(B) of 0.003 to 0.651. We find that the double spectator tagging method results in reduced uncertainties by a factor of 2 on the extracted neutron spin asymmetries over all kinematics and by a factor of 10 in the low-x(B) region, thereby providing valuable insight into the spin and flavor structure of nucleons. (C) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.