Nuclear parton density modifications from low-mass lepton pair production at the LHC

Abstract

In this article, we investigate the potential of low-mass lepton pair production in proton-ion collisions at the LHC to constrain nuclear modifications of parton densities. Similarly to prompt photon production, the transverse momentum spectrum is shown to be dominated by the QCD Compton process, but has virtually no fragmentation or isolation uncertainties. Depending on the orientation of the proton and ion beams and on the use of central or forward detector components, all interesting regions of nuclear effects (shadowing, antishadowing, isospin and EMC effects) can be probed. Ratios of cross sections allow to eliminate theoretical scale and bare-proton parton density errors as well as many experimental systematic uncertainties.

16 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Parton distributions for the LHC
• EPS09 - a New Generation of NLO and LO Nuclear Parton Distribution Functions
• Determination of nuclear parton distribution functions and their uncertainties at next-to-leading order
• Measuring gluon shadowing with prompt photons at RHIC and LHC
• Nuclear modification of vector boson production in proton-lead collisions at the LHC
• Low-mass lepton pair production at large transverse momentum

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Nuclear PDFs After the First Decade of LHC Data
• 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
• Nuclear parton density functions from jet production in DIS at the EIC
• Constraints on nuclear parton distributions from dijet photoproduction at the LHC
• Nuclear parton density functions from dijet photoproduction at the EIC
• $\varphi$-meson production at forward rapidity in p-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 5.02 TeV and in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 2.76 TeV
• Prompt photon production and photon-jet correlations at the LHC
• NLO Monte Carlo predictions for heavy-quark production at the LHC: pp collisions in ALICE
• Impact of scale, nuclear PDF and temperature variations on the interpretation of medium-modified jet production data from the LHC
• QCD analysis and effective temperature of direct photons in lead-lead collisions at the LHC
• Prompt photon production and photon-hadron jet correlations with POWHEG