English

The Photon Content of the Neutron

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2024-04-01 v2 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Nuclear Theory

Abstract

In this work, we complete our CT18qed study with the neutron's photon parton distribution function (PDF), which is essential for the nucleus scattering phenomenology. Two methods, CT18lux and CT18qed, based on the LUXqed formalism and the DGLAP evolution, respectively, to determine the neutron's photon PDF have been presented. Various low-Q2Q^2 non-perturbative variations have been carefully examined, which are treated as additional uncertainties on top of those induced by quark and gluon PDFs. The impacts of the momentum sum rule as well as isospin symmetry violation have been explored, and turn out to be negligible. A detailed comparison with other neutron's photon PDF sets has been performed, which shows a great improvement in the precision and a reasonable uncertainty estimation in our results. Finally, two phenomenological implications are demonstrated with photon-initiated processes: neutrino-nucleus WW-boson production, which is important for the near-future TeV--PeV neutrino observations, and the axion-like particle production at a high-energy muon beam-dump experiment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.10497,
  title  = {The Photon Content of the Neutron},
  author = {Keping Xie and Bei Zhou and T. J. Hobbs},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.10497},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

38 pages, 22 figures