2014/01/27 by M. Brandt, Matthias Brandt, Michael Klasen +2
Physics and Astronomy · #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Large Hadron Collider #Lepton #Nuclear physics #Pair production #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Parton #Physics #Proton #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Quantum chromodynamics #hep-ex #hep-ph #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.nuclphysa.2014.03.024
16 pages, 8 figures
arxiv created 2014/01/27 · openalex publication_date 2014/04/03 · arxiv updated 2015/06/18 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In this article, we investigate the potential of low-mass lepton pair production in proton-ion collisions at the LHC to constrain nuclear modifications of parton densities. Similarly to prompt photon production, the transverse momentum spectrum is shown to be dominated by the QCD Compton process, but has virtually no fragmentation or isolation uncertainties. Depending on the orientation of the proton and ion beams and on the use of central or forward detector components, all interesting regions of nuclear effects (shadowing, antishadowing, isospin and EMC effects) can be probed. Ratios of cross sections allow to eliminate theoretical scale and bare-proton parton density errors as well as many experimental systematic uncertainties.