No Arabic abstract
Inclusive jet production data are important for constraining the gluon distribution in the global QCD analysis of parton distribution functions. With the addition of recent CDF and D0 Run II jet data, we study a number of issues that play a role in determining the up-to-date gluon distribution and its uncertainty, and produce a new set of parton distributions that make use of that data. We present in detail the general procedures used to study the compatibility between new data sets and the previous body of data used in a global fit. We introduce a new method in which the Hessian matrix for uncertainties is ``rediagonalized to obtain eigenvector sets that conveniently characterize the uncertainty of a particular observable.
We report on an extensive global QCD analysis of new DIS and hadronic inclusive jet production data emphasizing the impact of these recent data on the determination of the gluon distribution, and on the interpretation of the high $E_t$ jets highlighted by the CDF collaboration. This analysis results in (i) a better handle on the range of uncertainty of the gluon distribution, (ii) a new generation of CTEQ parton distributions which incorporates this uncertainty, (iii) a viable scenario for accommodating the high $E_t$ jets in the conventional pQCD framework, and (iv) a systematic study of the sensitivity of the various hard processes to $alpha_s$ and the consistency of $alpha_s$ determination in global analysis.
The nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs) of gluons are known to be difficult to determine with fits of deep inelastic scattering (DIS) and Drell-Yan (DY) data alone. Therefore, the nCTEQ15 analysis of nuclear PDFs added inclusive neutral pion production data from RHIC to help in constraining the gluon. In this analysis, we present a new global analysis of nuclear PDFs based on a much larger set of single inclusive light hadron data from RHIC and the LHC. Using our new nCTEQ code (nCTEQ++) with an optimized version of INCNLO we study systematically the limitations of the theory and the impact of the fragmentation function uncertainty.
Using momentum sum rule for evolution equations for Double Parton Distribution Functions (DPDFs) in the leading logarithmic approximation, we find that the double gluon distribution function can be uniquely constrained via the single gluon distribution function. We also study numerically its evolution with a hard scale and show that an approximately factorized ansatz into the product of two single gluon distributions performs quite well at small values of $x$ but is always violated for larger values, as expected.
A precise knowledge of nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs) is -- among other things -- important for the unambiguous interpretation of hard process data taken in pA and AA collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The available fixed target data for deep inelastic scattering (DIS) and Drell-Yan (DY) lepton pair production mainly constrain the light quark distributions. It is hence crucial to include more and more collider data in global analyses of nPDFs in order to better pin down the different parton flavors, in particular the gluon distribution at small x. To help constrain the nuclear gluon PDF, we extend the nCTEQ15 analysis by including single inclusive hadron (SIH) production data from RHIC (PHENIX and STAR) and LHC (ALICE). In addition to the DIS, DY and SIH data sets, we will also include LHC W/Z production data. As the SIH calculation is dependent on hadronic fragmentation functions (FFs), we use a variety of FFs available in the literature to properly estimate this source of uncertainty. We study the impact of these data on the PDFs, and compare with both the nCTEQ15 and nCTEQ15WZ sets. The calculations are performed using a new implementation of the nCTEQ code (nCTEQ++) including a modified version of INCNLO which allows faster calculations using pre-computed grids. The extension of the nCTEQ15 analysis to include the SIH data represents an important step toward the next generation of PDFs.
Jets physics in heavy ion reactions is an important new area of active research at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that paves the way for novel tests of QCD multi-parton dynamics in dense nuclear matter. At present, perturbative QCD calculations of hard probes in elementary nucleon-nucleon reactions can be consistently combined with the effects of the nuclear medium up to $ {cal O}(alpha_s^3) $. While such accuracy is desirable but not necessary for leading particle tomography, it is absolutely essential for the new jet observables. With this motivation, we present first results and predictions to $ {cal O}(alpha_s^3) $ for the recent LHC lead-lead (Pb+Pb) run at a center-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV per nucleon-nucleon pair. Specifically, we focus on the suppression of the single and double inclusive jet cross sections. Our analysis includes not only final-state inelastic parton interactions in the QGP, but also initial-state cold nuclear matter effects and an estimate of the non-perturbative hadronization corrections. We demonstrate how an enhanced di-jet asymmetry in central Pb+Pb reactions at the LHC, recently measured by the ATLAS and CMS experiments, can be derived from these results. We show quantitatively that a fraction of this enhancement may be related to the ambiguity in the separation between the jet and the soft background medium and/or the diffusion of the parton shower energy away from the jet axis through collisional processes. We point to a suite of measurements that can help build a consistent picture of parton shower modification in heavy ion collisions at the LHC.