Inclusive-photon production and its dependence on photon isolation in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV using 139 fb${}^{-1}$ of ATLAS data

Abstract

Measurements of differential cross sections are presented for inclusive isolated-photon production in $pp$ collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV provided by the LHC and using 139 fb${}^{-1}$ of data recorded by the ATLAS experiment. The cross sections are measured as functions of the photon transverse energy in different regions of photon pseudorapidity. The photons are required to be isolated by means of a fixed-cone method with two different cone radii. The dependence of the inclusive-photon production on the photon isolation is investigated by measuring the fiducial cross sections as functions of the isolation-cone radius and the ratios of the differential cross sections with different radii in different regions of photon pseudorapidity. The results presented in this paper constitute an improvement with respect to those published by ATLAS earlier: the measurements are provided for different isolation radii and with a more granular segmentation in photon pseudorapidity that can be exploited in improving the determination of the proton parton distribution functions. These improvements provide a more in-depth test of the theoretical predictions. Next-to-leading-order QCD predictions from JETPHOX and SHERPA and next-to-next-to-leading-order QCD predictions from NNLOJET are compared to the measurements, using several parameterisations of the proton parton distribution functions. The measured cross sections are well described by the fixed-order QCD predictions within the experimental and theoretical uncertainties in most of the investigated phase-space region.

arXiv comment69 pages in total, author list starting page 52, 21 figures, 2 tables, submitted to JHEP. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/STDM-2018-39/

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• Measurement of the inclusive isolated-photon production cross section in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV
• Master Integrals for Electroweak corrections to $gg\to \gamma \gamma$ -- Light quark contributions
• Single isolated photon production in the NLO${}^{\star }$ approximation of the Parton Reggeization Approach
• Prospects for sub-EW-scale ALP searches via $\gamma +b\bar{b}$ signatures at the LHC using jet substructure techniques
• Measurement of the inclusive isolated-photon production cross section in pp and Pb$-$Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=5.02$ TeV