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arXiv · 2609.17163

New parton distribution functions of the real photon

Madhav Chithirasreemadam·Vadim Guzey·Felix Hekhorn·Ilkka Helenius·Hannu Paukkunen
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Abstract

Precise determination of the partonic structure of real photons has attracted renewed interest in view of ongoing studies of high-energy photon-induced processes in ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). Despite being fundamental in their own right and essential for QCD phenomenology of hard processes initiated by resolved photons, the quark and gluon distributions of the photon are poorly known and merit a new analysis employing modern tools of statistical data analysis. We determine new sets of leading-order (LO) and next-to-leading-order (NLO) parton distributions (PDFs) for the real photon, dubbed VALO1.0, by performing a global QCD analysis of the world data on the photon structure function $F_2^γ$ measured in deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) processes on a real photon target in electron-positron collisions. Our analysis improves on the results available in the literature by providing uncertainties in the form of Monte Carlo replicas and the photon PDFs in the LHAPDF6 format. We observe that while the electron-positron data allow us to determine the singlet quark distribution very well at both LO and NLO, the gluon distribution is constrained to a much lesser degree, especially at LO. For this analysis, we have developed an open-source framework, which extends the pineline framework, developed for the proton, to the photon case and includes the program solving the inhomogeneous scale evolution of photon PDFs, $γ$EKO.

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Madhav Chithirasreemadam, Vadim Guzey, Felix Hekhorn, Ilkka Helenius, Hannu Paukkunen. 2026-09-15. New parton distribution functions of the real photon. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17163

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