Inclusive electron-proton measurement prospects in the Electron-Ion Collider early science stage
We explore the potential for extracting proton structure functions, proton parton density functions (PDFs), and the strong coupling $\alpha_s(M_z^2)$, using early science data from the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), both standalone, and in combination with HERA data. Different scenarios are considered in which samples with modest luminosity are collected at either two or three EIC beam energy configurations. The Rosenbluth separation method is used to extract the proton structure functions $F_2$ and $F_L$ from simulated data in a model-independent manner, showing that $F_L$ can be extracted significantly more precisely with three centre of mass energies than with two, whilst also obtaining $F_2$ to higher precision than has been achieved previously. The inclusion of a third beam configuration is also beneficial in the extraction of the strong coupling $\alpha_s(M_z^2)$ that is obtainable with unprecedented experimental precision with the early EIC data. Additionally, the precision of the proton PDFs is improved when adding these data, especially for large values of Bjorken-$x$, for both two and three EIC beam energy configurations. These studies show that EIC data will already be a highly competitive probe of perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics within the first five years of data taking.