Probing gluon and heavy-quark nuclear PDFs with γ + Q production in pA collisions

Abstract

We present a detailed phenomenological study of direct photon production in association with a heavy-quark jet in pA collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at next-to-leading order in QCD. The dominant contribution to the cross-section comes from the gluon-heavy-quark (gQ) initiated subprocess, making γ + Q production a process very sensitive to both the gluon and the heavy-quark parton distribution functions (PDFs). Additionally the RHIC and LHC experiments are probing complementary kinematic regions in the momentum fraction x2 carried by the target partons. Thus, the nuclear production ratio R γ+QpA can provide strong constraints, over a broad x-range, on the poorly determined nuclear parton distribution functions which are extremely important for the interpretation of results in heavy-ion collisions. © SISSA 2011.