No Arabic abstract
We present a first, detailed study of diffractive dijet photoproduction at the recently approved electron-ion collider (EIC) at BNL. Apart from establishing the kinematic reaches for various beam types, energies and kinematic cuts, we make precise predictions at next-to-leading order (NLO) of QCD in the most important kinematic variables. We show that the EIC will provide new and more precise information on the diffractive parton density functions (PDFs) in the pomeron than previously obtained at HERA, illuminate the still disputed mechanism of global vs. only resolved-photon factorization breaking, and provide access to a completely new quantity, i.e. nuclear diffractive PDFs.
We discuss the prospects of diffractive dijet photoproduction at the EIC to distinguish different fits of diffractive proton PDFs, different schemes of factorization breaking, to determine diffractive nuclear PDFs and pion PDFs from leading neutron production.
We present a next-to-leading order QCD calculation of inclusive dijet photoproduction in ultraperipheral Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC and show that the results agree very well with various kinematic distributions measured by the ATLAS collaboration. The effect of including these data in nCTEQ or EPPS16 nuclear parton density functions (nPDFs) is then studied using the Bayesian reweighting technique. For an assumed total error of 5% on the final data, its inclusion would lead to a significant reduction of the nPDF uncertainties of up to a factor of two at small values of the parton momentum fraction. As an outlook, we discuss future analyes of diffractive nPDFs, which are so far completely unknown.
We calculate the cross section of inclusive dijet photoproduction in ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs) of heavy ions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider using next-to-leading order perturbative QCD and demonstrate that it provides a good description of the ATLAS data. We study the role of this data in constraining nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs) using the Bayesian reweighting technique and find that it can reduce current uncertainties of nPDFs at small $x$ by a factor of 2. We also make predictions for diffractive dijet photoproduction in UPCs and examine its potential to shed light on the disputed mechanism of QCD factorization breaking in diffraction.
Using next-to-leading order (NLO) perturbative QCD, we calculate the diffractive contribution to inclusive dijet photoproduction in Pb-Pb ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs) at the LHC and find that it does not exceed 5% in small-$x_A$ bins in the ATLAS kinematics at $sqrt{s_{NN}}=5.02$ TeV. Its smallness is a result of the restricted kinematics ($p_{T1} > 20$ GeV and $x_A > 0.001$) and the large nuclear suppression of nuclear diffractive parton distribution functions predicted in the leading twist model of nuclear shadowing. Thus, in an analysis of new constraints on nuclear parton distribution functions (PDFs) at small $x_A$ using the LHC data on inclusive dijet photoproduction in heavy-ion UPCs, one can safely neglect the correction factor due to the excluded diffractive contribution. At the same time, applying our framework to proton-proton UPCs at $sqrt{s_{NN}}=13$ TeV, we find that the ratio of the diffractive and inclusive cross sections of dijet photoproduction can reach $20-25$% for $x_p sim 5 times 10^{-5}$.
We make predictions for the cross sections of diffractive dijet photoproduction in $pp$, $pA$ and $AA$ ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs) at the LHC during Runs 1 and 2 using next-to-leading perturbative QCD. We find that the resulting cross sections are sufficiently large and, compared to lepton-proton scattering at HERA, have an enhanced sensitivity to small observed momentum fractions in the diffractive exchange, commonly denoted $z_{P}^{rm jets}$, and an unprecedented reach in the invariant mass of the photon-nucleon system $W$. We examine two competing schemes of diffractive QCD factorization breaking, which assume either a global suppression factor or a suppression for resolved photons only and demonstrate that the two scenarios can be distinguished by the nuclear dependence of the distributions in the observed parton momentum fraction in the photon $x_{gamma}^{rm jets}$.