Light-nuclei gluons from dijet production in proton-oxygen collisions

TL;DR

This paper explores the feasibility of measuring dijet cross sections in proton-oxygen collisions at LHC, aiming to improve understanding of nuclear parton distributions using next-to-leading-order QCD predictions.

Contribution

It demonstrates that a feasible experimental setup can constrain light nuclei PDFs through dijet measurements without requiring a proton-proton reference.

Findings

Measurement is feasible with current LHC capabilities.

A few inverse nanobarns of data can provide new nuclear PDF constraints.

Proposes a mixed-energy ratio to reduce proton PDF uncertainties.

Abstract

The prospects of measuring a single-differential dijet cross section during the proposed short proton-oxygen data taking at LHC Run 3 are studied using next-to-leading-order perturbative QCD predictions. With reasonable experimental cuts and luminosity estimates, such a measurement is found to be feasible, and a few inverse nanobarns of integrated luminosity is estimated to be enough to yield new constraints on parton distribution functions (PDFs) of light nuclei. In the absence of a dedicated proton-proton reference, a mixed-energy nuclear modification ratio is proposed for cancelling free-proton PDF uncertainties to obtain a direct access to the nuclear modifications of the parton distributions in oxygen.