Leptons in the Proton

Abstract

As is the case for all light coloured Standard Model particles, also photons and charged leptons appear as constituents in ultrarelativistic hadron beams, and admit a parton density function (PDF). It has been shown recently that the photon PDF can be given in terms of the structure functions and form factors for electron-proton scattering. The same holds for lepton PDFs. In the present work we set up a calculation of the lepton PDFs at next-to-leading order, using the same data input needed in the photon case. A precise knowledge of the lepton densities allows us to study lepton-initiated processes even at a hadron collider, with all possible combinations of same-charge, opposite-charge, same-flavour, different-flavour leptons and leptons-quarks, most of which cannot be realized in any other foreseeable experiment. The lepton densities in the proton are extremely small, so that their contribution to Standard Model processes is generally shadowed by processes initiated by coloured partons. We will show, however, that there are cases where these processes can be relevant, giving rise to rare Standard Model signatures and to new production channels, that can enlarge the discovery potential of New Physics at the LHC and future high energy colliders with hadrons in the initial state.

43 pages, 14 figures. In V2 we have included a class of subleading O(alpha^2) contributions to the lepton PDFs and motivated this choice. Data in the LHAPDF files have been updated accordingly (see info file). V2 is identical to the published version

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• Physics with Leptons and Photons at the LHC
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• On Drell-Yan production of scalar leptoquarks coupling to heavy-quark flavours
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• Search for scalar leptoquarks produced via $\tau$-lepton-quark scattering in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV
• Search for resonant leptoquark production via lepton-jet signatures in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV and $\sqrt{s}=13.6$ TeV with the ATLAS detector
• Probing triple-gauge couplings in anomalous gauge theories at hadron and lepton colliders
• Leptophilic Portals to New Physics at Colliders
• Photon and Leptons induced processes at the LHC
• Illuminating the charged leptons in the proton