On the Investigation of the Proton Structure Using QED Compton Events in ep Scattering

Abstract

QED Compton scattering at HERA is discussed in terms of the information it may reveal on the proton structure at low momentum transfers Q2. Detailed Monte Carlo studies are performed which show that the analysis of inelastic QED Compton events allows the extension of present HERA structure function measurements to a kinematic regime, which up to now was only accessed in fixed target data. For these studies an improved version of the COMPTON event generator is used, where special emphasis has been put on modelling the hadronic final state at low invariant masses. As the low Q2 regime is sometimes also discussed in the context of the collinear approximation and the possibility of measuring the photonic content of the proton, the Monte Carlo studies are also used to check the validity of this approach. It is found that the proposed concept of a photon density of the proton does not provide sufficient accuracy for the description of inelastic QED Compton scattering.

12 pages, 8 figures, to be submitted to EPJ

References in corpus (2)

• The Polarized and Unpolarized Photon Content of the Nucleon
• Delineating the polarized and unpolarized photon distributions of the nucleon in eN collisions

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Radiatively Generated Isospin Violations in the Nucleon and the NuTeV Anomaly
• Determination of the Integrated Luminosity at HERA using Elastic QED Compton Events
• Light Sea Fermions in Electron-Proton and Muon-Proton Interactions
• Measurement of the Proton Structure Function F_2 at low Q^2 in QED Compton Scattering at HERA
• Probing the polarized photon content of the proton in $ep$ collisions at the EIC
• Accessing the Longitudinally Polarized Photon Content of the Proton