Inclusive-photon production and its dependence on photon isolation in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt s=13$ TeV using 139 fb$^{-1}$ of ATLAS data

TL;DR

This paper presents detailed measurements of inclusive isolated-photon production at 13 TeV, exploring how photon isolation parameters affect cross sections, and compares results with advanced QCD theoretical predictions to improve understanding of proton structure.

Contribution

It provides new, granular measurements of photon production with varying isolation radii and pseudorapidity segmentation, enhancing the constraints on proton parton distribution functions.

Findings

Measured cross sections agree with QCD predictions within uncertainties.

Isolation radius significantly influences photon production cross sections.

Results improve the precision of proton structure models.

Abstract

Measurements of differential cross sections are presented for inclusive isolated-photon production in $pp$ collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV provided by the LHC and using 139 fb$^{-1}$ of data recorded by the ATLAS experiment. The cross sections are measured as functions of the photon transverse energy in different regions of photon pseudorapidity. The photons are required to be isolated by means of a fixed-cone method with two different cone radii. The dependence of the inclusive-photon production on the photon isolation is investigated by measuring the fiducial cross sections as functions of the isolation-cone radius and the ratios of the differential cross sections with different radii in different regions of photon pseudorapidity. The results presented in this paper constitute an improvement with respect to those published by ATLAS earlier: the measurements are provided for different isolation radii and with a more granular segmentation in photon pseudorapidity that can be exploited in improving the determination of the proton parton distribution functions. These improvements provide a more in-depth test of the theoretical predictions. Next-to-leading-order QCD predictions from JETPHOX and SHERPA and next-to-next-to-leading-order QCD predictions from NNLOJET are compared to the measurements, using several parameterisations of the proton parton distribution functions. The measured cross sections are well described by the fixed-order QCD predictions within the experimental and theoretical uncertainties in most of the investigated phase-space region.