Direct photon production and PDF fits reloaded
Abstract
Direct photon production in hadronic collisions provides a handle on the gluon PDF by means of the QCD Compton scattering process. In this work we revisit the impact of direct photon production on a global PDF analysis, motivated by the recent availability of the next-to-next-to-leading (NNLO) calculation for this process. We demonstrate that the inclusion of NNLO QCD and leading-logarithmic electroweak corrections leads to a good quantitative agreement with the ATLAS measurements at 8 TeV and 13 TeV, except for the most forward rapidity region in the former case. By including the ATLAS 8 TeV direct photon production data in the NNPDF3.1 NNLO global analysis, we assess its impact on the medium-x gluon. We also study the constraining power of the direct photon production measurements on PDF fits based on different datasets, in particular on the NNPDF3.1 no-LHC and collider-only fits. We also present updated NNLO theoretical predictions for direct photon production at 13 TeV that include the constraints from the 8 TeV measurements.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1802.03021,
title = {Direct photon production and PDF fits reloaded},
author = {John M. Campbell and Juan Rojo and Emma Slade and Ciaran Williams},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.03021},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
27 pages, 14 figures. Version accepted for publication in EPJC