No Arabic abstract
We discuss the phenomenology of initial-state parton-kt broadening in direct-photon production and related processes in hadron collisions. After a brief summary of the theoretical basis for a Gaussian-smearing approach, we present a systematic study of recent results on fixed-target and collider direct-photon production, using complementary data on diphoton and pion production to provide empirical guidance on the required amount of kt broadening. This approach provides a consistent description of the observed pattern of deviation of next-to-leading order QCD calculations relative to the direct-photon data, and accounts for the shape and normalization difference between fixed-order perturbative calculations and the data. We also discuss the uncertainties in this phenomenological approach, the implications of these results on the extraction of the gluon distribution of the nucleon, and the comparison of our findings to recent related work.
We present the computation of the direct photon production cross-section in perturbative QCD to all orders in the limit of high partonic center-of-mass energy. We show how the high-energy resummation can be performed consistently in the presence of a collinear singularity in the final state, we compare our results to the fixed order NLO cross-section in MSbar scheme, and we provide predictions at NNLO and beyond.
We extend next-to-leading logarithmic threshold and joint resummation for prompt photon production to include leading collinear effects. The impact of these effects is assessed for both fixed-target and collider kinematics. We find them in general to be small, but noticeable.
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.
Prompt photons produced in a hard reaction are not accompanied with any final state interaction, either energy loss or absorption. Therefore, besides the Cronin enhancement at medium transverse momenta pT and small isotopic corrections at larger pT, one should not expect any nuclear effects. However, data from PHENIX experiment exhibit a significant large-pT suppression in central d+Au and Au+Au collisions that cannot be accompanied by coherent phenomena. We demonstrate that such an unexpected result is subject to the energy sharing problem near the kinematic limit and is universally induced by multiple initial state interactions. We describe production of photons in the color dipole approach and find a good agreement with available data in p+p collisions. Besides explanation of large-pT nuclear suppression at RHIC we present for the first time predictions for expected nuclear effects also in the LHC energy range at different rapidities. We include and analyze also a contribution of gluon shadowing as a leading twist shadowing correction modifying nuclear effects at small and medium pT.
We have developed an event generator for direct-photon production in hadron collisions, including associated two-jet production in the framework of the GR@PPA event generator. The event generator consistently combines $gamma$ + 2-jet production processes with the lowest-order $gamma$ + jet and photon-radiation (fragmentation) processes from QCD 2-jet production using a subtraction method. The generated events can be fed to general-purpose event generators to facilitate the addition of hadronization and decay simulations. Using the obtained event information, we can simulate photon isolation and hadron-jet reconstruction at the particle (hadron) level. The simulation reasonably reproduces measurement data obtained at the LHC concerning not only the inclusive photon spectrum, but also the correlation between the photon and jet. The simulation implies that the contribution of the $gamma$ + 2-jet is very large, especially in low photon-$p_{T}$ ($lesssim$ 50 GeV) regions. Discrepancies observed at low $p_{T}$, although marginal, may indicate the necessity for the consideration of further higher-order processes. Unambiguous particle-level definition of the photon-isolation condition for the signal events is desired to be given explicitly in future measurements.