Production of three isolated photons in the parton Reggeization approach at high energies

TL;DR

This paper investigates three-photon production at high energies in proton-proton collisions using the parton Reggeization approach, incorporating NLO corrections, and compares predictions with LHC data, finding good agreement and predictions for higher energies.

Contribution

The study applies the parton Reggeization approach with NLO corrections to three-photon production, providing improved predictions that align with experimental data and extend to higher energies.

Findings

Good agreement with ATLAS data at 8 TeV

Predictions of increased cross sections at 13 and 27 TeV

NLO corrections significantly improve theoretical accuracy

Abstract

We study a large-$p_T$ three-photon production in proton-proton collisions at the LHC. We use the leading order (LO) approximation of the parton Reggeization approach consistently merged with the next-to-leading order corrections originated from the emission of additional jet. For numerical calculations we use the parton-level generator KaTie and modified KMR-type unintegrated parton distribution functions which satisfy exact normalization conditions for arbitrary $x$. We compare our prediction with data from ATLAS collaboration at the center-of-mass energy $\sqrt{s}=8$ TeV. We find that the inclusion of the real next-to-leading-order corrections leads to a good agreement between our predictions and data with the same accuracy as for the next-to-next-to-leading calculations based on the collinear parton model of QCD. At higher energies ($\sqrt{s}=13$ and 27 TeV) parton Reggeization approach predicts larger cross sections, up to $\sim 15$ \% and $\sim 30$ \%, respectively.