No Arabic abstract
The photon PDF of the proton is needed for precision comparisons of LHC cross sections with theoretical predictions. In a recent paper, we showed how the photon PDF could be determined in terms of the electromagnetic proton structure functions $F_2$ and $F_L$ measured in electron-proton scattering experiments, and gave an explicit formula for the PDF including all terms up to next-to-leading order. In this paper we give details of the derivation. We obtain the photon PDF using the factorisation theorem and applying it to suitable BSM hard scattering processes. We also obtain the same PDF in a process-independent manner using the usual definition of PDFs in terms of light-cone Fourier transforms of products of operators. We show how our method gives an exact representation for the photon PDF in terms of $F_2$ and $F_L$, valid to all orders in QED and QCD, and including all non-perturbative corrections. This representation is then used to give an explicit formula for the photon PDF to one order higher than our previous result. We also generalise our results to obtain formulae for the polarised photon PDF, as well as the photon TMDPDF. Using our formula, we derive the $P_{gamma i}$ subset of DGLAP splitting functions to order $alpha alpha_s$ and $alpha^2$, which agree with known results. We give a detailed explanation of the approach that we follow to determine a photon PDF and its uncertainty within the above framework.
Recently, two photon PDF sets based on implementations of the LUX ansatz into the CT18 global analysis were released. In CT18lux, the photon PDF is calculated directly using the LUX master formula for all scales, $mu$. In an alternative realization, CT18qed, the photon PDF is initialized at the starting scale, $mu_0$, using the LUX formulation and evolved to higher scales $mu(>mu_0)$ with a combined QED+QCD kernel at $mathcal{O}(alpha),~mathcal{O}(alphaalpha_s)$ and $mathcal{O}(alpha^2)$. In the small-$x$ region, the photon PDF uncertainty is mainly induced by the quark and gluon PDFs, through the perturbative DIS structure functions. In comparison, the large-$x$ photon uncertainty comes from various low-energy, nonperturbative contributions, including variations of the inelastic structure functions in the resonance and continuum regions, higher-twist and target-mass corrections, and elastic electromagnetic form factors of the proton. We take the production of doubly-charged Higgs pairs, $(H^{++}H^{--})$, as an example of scenarios beyond the Standard Model to illustrate the phenomenological implications of these photon PDFs at the LHC.
We propose a new experimental method to probe the photon parton distribution function inside the proton (photon PDF) at LHC energies. The method is based on the measurement of dilepton production from the $gamma prightarrowell^+ell^-+X$ reaction in proton--lead collisions. These experimental conditions guarantee a clean environment, both in terms of reconstruction of the final state and in terms of possible background. We firstly calculate the cross sections for this process with collinear photon PDFs, where we identify optimal choice of the scale, in analogy to deep inelastic scattering kinematics. We then perform calculations including the transverse-momentum dependence of the probed photon. Finally we estimate rates of the process for the existing LHC data samples.
We present a first attempt to design a quantum circuit for the determination of the parton content of the proton through the estimation of parton distribution functions (PDFs), in the context of high energy physics (HEP). The growing interest in quantum computing and the recent developments of new algorithms and quantum hardware devices motivates the study of methodologies applied to HEP. In this work we identify architectures of variational quantum circuits suitable for PDFs representation (qPDFs). We show experiments about the deployment of qPDFs on real quantum devices, taking into consideration current experimental limitations. Finally, we perform a global qPDF determination from collider data using quantum computer simulation on classical hardware and we compare the obtained partons and related phenomenological predictions involving hadronic processes to modern PDFs.
We investigate the feasibility of constraining parton distribution functions in the proton through a comparison with data on semi-inclusive deep-inelastic lepton-nucleon scattering. Specifically, we reweight replicas of these distributions according to how well they reproduce recent, very precise charged kaon multiplicity measurements and analyze how this procedure optimizes the determination of the sea quark densities and improves their uncertainties. The results can help to shed new light on the long standing question on the size of the flavor and charge symmetry breaking among quarks of radiative origin. An iterative method is proposed and adopted to account for the inevitable correlation with what is assumed about the parton-to-hadron fragmentation functions in the reweighting procedure. It is shown how the fragmentation functions can be optimized simultaneously in each step of the iteration. As a first case study, we implement this method to analyze kaon production data.
Constraints on the intrinsic charm probability $wccm = P_{{mathrm{c}bar mathrm{c}} / mathrm{p}}$ in the proton are obtained for the first time from LHC measurements. The ATLAS Collaboration data for the production of prompt photons, accompanied by a charm-quark jet in pp collisions at $sqrt s = 8 $ TeV, are used. The upper limit mbox{$wccm < 1.93$~%} is obtained at the 68~% confidence level. This constraint is primarily determined from the theoretical scale and systematical experimental uncertainties. Suggestions for reducing these uncertainties are discussed. The implications of intrinsic heavy quarks in the proton for future studies at the LHC are also discussed.