Photoproduction of heavy quarks in ultraperipheral pp, pA, and AA collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

TL;DR

This paper investigates the next-to-leading order photoproduction of heavy quarks in ultraperipheral pp, pA, and AA collisions at the LHC, highlighting its potential to constrain nuclear parton distributions and gluon shadowing effects.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of heavy quark photoproduction at NLO in various ultraperipheral collision systems, emphasizing its sensitivity to nuclear modifications.

Findings

Photoproduction cross sections are sensitive to nuclear effects.

PbPb collisions show significant sensitivity to nuclear modifications.

pPb collisions can help constrain gluon shadowing models.

Abstract

Photoproduction of heavy quarks in ultraperipheral collisions can help elucidate important features of the physics of heavy quarks in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). Due to the dependence on parton distributions it can also potentially offer some constraining ability in the determination of nuclear parton distributions. In the present study we consider next-to-leading order (NLO) photoproduction of heavy quarks in ultraperipheral proton-proton (pp), proton-nucleus (pA), and nucleus-nucleus (AA) collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Total cross sections and rapidity distributions are considered and the influence of nuclear modifications of parton distributions on these quantities are explored for pA and AA collisions. We find that photoproduction of heavy quarks in PbPb collisions exhibit significant sensitivity to nuclear effects, and in conjunction with photoproduction in pPb collisions, affords good constraining potential for gluon shadowing determination.