sPHENIX Heavy Flavor Jet Physics

The sPHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) will enable an unprecedented series of high precision heavy flavor hadron and jet measurements in 200 GeV p+p and Au+Au collisions. The Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor (MAPS) based Vertex Detector (MVTX), the Intermediate Silicon Tracker (INTT) and the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) at sPHENIX can provide high precision primary/displaced vertex and track reconstruction in the pseudorapidity region of $|\eta| \le 1.1$. The sPHENIX ElectroMagnetic Calorimeter (EMCal) and Hadronic Calorimeter (HCal), used for the first time in mid-rapidity at RHIC, will provide good energy measurements for full jet reconstruction. The heavy flavor jet and jet substructure measurements at sPHENIX will provide vital information about the flavor-dependent parton energy loss mechanism and whether the heavy quark hadronization process gets modified in a nuclear medium. Less recombination contribution to the heavy quark production is expected at RHIC compared to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) measurements, which makes these measurements an unique approach to explore the universality of heavy quark fragmentation functions in different nuclear environments. We will present the status of the sPHENIX detector commissioning with 200 GeV p+p data in 2024 and the progress of recent heavy flavor jet studies in 200 GeV p+p simulations with realistic sPHENIX detector performance.