New information on photon fragmentation functions

Abstract

Thermal photons radiated in heavy-ion collisions represent an important signal for a recently discovered new state of matter, the deconfined quark-gluon plasma. However, a clean identification of this signal requires precise knowledge of the prompt photons produced simultaneously in hard collisions of quarks and gluons, mostly through their fragmentation. In this paper, we demonstrate that PHENIX data on photons produced in proton-proton collisions with low transverse momenta allow to extract new information on this fragmentation process. While existing data do not yet convincingly favor one parameterization (BFG II) over the two other frequently used photon fragmentation functions (BFG I and GRV NLO), the data sets recorded by PHENIX and STAR at BNL RHIC in 2013 with tenfold higher statistics should allow for such an analysis.

5 pages, 3 figures, 1 table

References in corpus (3)

• New parton distributions for collider physics
• A new critical study of photon production in hadronic collisions
• Photon - Jet Correlations and Constraints on Fragmentation Functions

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Parton Fragmentation Functions
• Collectivity and electromagnetic radiation in small systems
• Production and Elliptic Flow of Dileptons and Photons in the semi-Quark Gluon Plasma
• 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