Speaker
Description
Precise determination of the partonic structure of real photons has attracted renewed interest in view of ongoing studies of high-energy photon-induced processes in ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and at the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). Despite being fundamental in their own right and essential for QCD phenomenology of hard processes initiated by resolved photons, the quark and gluon distributions of the photon are poorly known and merit a new analysis employing modern tools of statistical data analysis.
We determine new sets of leading order (LO) and next-to-leading order (NLO) parton distributions (PDFs) of the real photon by performing a global QCD analysis of the world data on the photon structure function $F_2^{\gamma}(x,Q^2)$ measured in deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) processes on a real photon target in electron-positron collisions. Our analysis improves on the results available in the literature by providing uncertainties in the form of Monte-Carlo replicas and PDFs in the LHAPDF6 format. While electron-positron data determines the singlet quark distribution very well at both LO and NLO, the gluon distribution is constrained to a much lesser degree, especially at LO. For this analysis, we have developed an open-source framework, which extends the pineline framework to the photon case and includes the program solving the inhomogeneous $Q^2$ evolution of photon PDFs, $\gamma$EKO.
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