Probing gluon and heavy-quark nuclear PDFs with photon + heavy quark production in pA collisions

Abstract

We present a detailed phenomenological study of direct photon production in association with a heavy-quark jet in pA collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at next-to-leading order in QCD. The dominant contribution to the cross-section comes from the gluon--heavy-quark (gQ) initiated subprocess, making γ+ Q production a process very sensitive to both the gluon and the heavy-quark parton distribution functions (PDFs). Additionally, the RHIC and LHC experiments are probing complementary kinematic regions in the momentum fraction x_2 carried by the target partons. Thus, the nuclear production ratio R^{γ+Q}_{pA} can provide strong constraints, over a broad x-range, on the poorly determined nuclear parton distribution functions which are extremely important for the interpretation of results in heavy-ion collisions.

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Cited by in corpus (25)

• nCTEQ15 - Global analysis of nuclear parton distributions with uncertainties in the CTEQ framework
• Gluon Shadowing in Heavy-Flavor Production at the LHC
• A review of the intrinsic heavy quark content of the nucleon
• CT14 Intrinsic Charm Parton Distribution Functions from CTEQ-TEA Global Analysis
• Intrinsic charm in a matched general-mass scheme
• Constraining Gluon Shadowing Using Photoproduction in Ultraperipheral pA and AA Collisions
• Inclusive prompt photon production in nuclear collisions at RHIC and LHC
• Searching for intrinsic charm in the proton at the LHC
• Probing the small-$x$ nuclear gluon distributions with isolated photons at forward rapidities in p+Pb collisions at the LHC
• A QCD analysis of LHCb D-meson data in p+Pb collisions
• Nuclear PDFs in the beginning of the LHC era
• Reweighted nuclear PDFs using Heavy-Flavor Production Data at the LHC: nCTEQ15_rwHF & EPPS16_rwHF
• Measurement of D-meson production versus multiplicity in p-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=5.02$ TeV
• The impact of the intrinsic charm quark content of the proton on differential $\gamma +c$ cross section
• Photon-tagged heavy meson production in high energy nuclear collisions
• Prompt photon production and photon-jet correlations at the LHC
• Bayesian reweighting of nuclear PDFs and constraints from proton-lead collisions at the LHC
• Prompt photon in association with a heavy-quark jet in Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC
• Nucleon structure and hard p-p processes at high energies
• The uncertainty of parton distribution functions due to physical observables in a global analysis
• Nuclear gluons at RHIC in a multi-observable approach
• Global analysis of nuclear PDFs - latest developments
• Physics with high-luminosity proton-nucleus collisions at the LHC
• Probing nuclear parton densities and parton energy loss processes through photon + heavy-quark jet production in p-A and A-A collisions
• Centrality and rapidity dependence of inclusive pion and prompt photon production in p+Pb collisions at the LHC with EPS09s nPDFs