Probing the photonic content of the proton using photon-induced dilepton production in $p+\text{Pb}$ collisions at the LHC

Abstract

We propose a new experimental method to probe the photon parton distribution function inside the proton (photon PDF) at LHC energies. The method is based on the measurement of dilepton production from the $\gamma p\to {\ell }^{+}{\ell }^{-}+X$ reaction in proton--lead collisions. These experimental conditions guarantee a clean environment, both in terms of reconstruction of the final state and in terms of possible background. We firstly calculate the cross sections for this process with collinear photon PDFs, where we identify optimal choice of the scale, in analogy to deep inelastic scattering kinematics. We then perform calculations including the transverse-momentum dependence of the probed photon. Finally we estimate rates of the process for the existing LHC data samples.

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