arXiv subjects

Pavel M. Nadolsky

Publications and source records attributed to Pavel M. Nadolsky.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2022

Heavy-flavor impact on CTEQ-TEA global QCD analyses

We discuss heavy-flavor production at hadron colliders in recent global QCD analyses to determine parton distribution functions (PDFs) in the proton. We discuss heavy-flavor treatments in precision theory predictions at the LHC. In particular, we discuss factorization schemes in presence of heavy flavors in proton-proton collisions, as well as the impact of heavy-flavor production at the LHC on PDFs. We show results of recent updates beyond CT18, the latest global QCD analysis from the CTEQ-TEA group.

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arXiv2022

The Forward Physics Facility: Sites, Experiments, and Physics Potential

The Forward Physics Facility (FPF) is a proposal to create a cavern with the space and infrastructure to support a suite of far-forward experiments at the Large Hadron Collider during the High Luminosity era. Located along the beam collision axis and shielded from the interaction point by at least 100 m of concrete and rock, the FPF will house experiments that will detect particles outside the acceptance of the existing large LHC experiments and will observe rare and exotic processes in an extremely low-background environment. In this work, we summarize the current status of plans for the FPF, including recent progress in civil engineering in identifying promising sites for the FPF and the experiments currently envisioned to realize the FPF's physics potential. We then review the many Standard Model and new physics topics that will be advanced by the FPF, including searches for long-lived particles, probes of dark matter and dark sectors, high-statistics studies of TeV neutrinos of all three flavors, aspects of perturbative and non-perturbative QCD, and high-energy astroparticle physics.

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arXiv2022

The PDF4LHC21 combination of global PDF fits for the LHC Run III

A precise knowledge of the quark and gluon structure of the proton, encoded by the parton distribution functions (PDFs), is of paramount importance for the interpretation of high-energy processes at present and future lepton-hadron and hadron-hadron colliders. Motivated by recent progress in the PDF determinations carried out by the CT, MSHT, and NNPDF groups, we present an updated combination of global PDF fits: PDF4LHC21. It is based on the Monte Carlo combination of the CT18, MSHT20, and NNPDF3.1 sets followed by either its Hessian reduction or its replica compression. Extensive benchmark studies are carried out in order to disentangle the origin of the differences between the three global PDF sets. In particular, dedicated fits based on almost identical theory settings and input datasets are performed by the three groups, highlighting the role played by the respective fitting methodologies. We compare the new PDF4LHC21 combination with its predecessor, PDF4LHC15, demonstrating their good overall consistency and a modest reduction of PDF uncertainties for key LHC processes such as electroweak gauge boson production and Higgs boson production in gluon fusion. We study the phenomenological implications of PDF4LHC21 for a representative selection of inclusive, fiducial, and differential cross sections at the LHC. The PDF4LHC21 combination is made available via the LHAPDF library and provides a robust, user-friendly, and efficient method to estimate the PDF uncertainties associated to theoretical calculations for the upcoming Run III of the LHC and beyond.

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arXiv2022

NNLO constraints on proton PDFs from the SeaQuest and STAR experiments and other developments in the CTEQ-TEA global analysis

We review progress in the global QCD analysis by the CTEQ-TEA group since the publication of CT18 parton distribution functions (PDFs) in the proton. Specifically, we discuss comparisons of CT18 NNLO predictions with the LHC 13 TeV measurements as well as with the FNAL SeaQuest and BNL STAR data on lepton pair production. The specialized CT18X PDFs approximating saturation effects are compared with the CT18sx PDFs obtained using NLL/NLO small-$x$ resummation. Short summaries are presented for the special CT18 parton distributions with fitted charm and with lattice QCD inputs. A recent comparative analysis of the impact of deuteron nuclear effects on the parton distributions by the CTEQ-JLab and CTEQ-TEA groups is summarized.

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arXiv2021

Large-x power laws of parton distributions remain inconclusive

Focusing on hadron scattering at large partonic momentum fractions $x$, we compare nonperturbative QCD predictions for the asymptotic behavior of DIS structure functions and parton distribution functions (PDFs) to the $x$ and $Q$ dependence of phenomenological PDFs. In the CT18 NNLO global QCD analysis, higher-order radiative contributions and functional mimicry of PDF parametrizations result in about one unit of uncertainty in the effective powers of $(1-x)$ falloff of nucleon PDFs. Similar uncertainties are present in the case of the pion PDF, an object of growing interest in phenomenology.

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arXiv2021

Nucleon and pion PDFs: large-x asymptotics meets functional mimicry

We review strategies to unveil the primordial large-$x$ structure of the nucleons as well as the pion from hard-scattering experiments. Ideas are presented for learning about the $x\to 1$ limit of nonperturbative QCD dynamics at energy scales of order 1 GeV from collider experiments at much higher scales. The behavior of parton distributions at $x\to 1$ predicted by the quark counting rules and other low-energy theoretical approaches is contrasted with phenomenological PDFs. Polynomial mimicry of PDF parametrizations is one of many factors that influence the apparent power of the $(1-x)$ falloff. We discuss implications of the mimicry for the large-$x$ falloff of the pion PDFs.

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arXiv2021

A general-mass scheme for prompt charm production at hadron colliders

In these proceedings, we apply the recently developed S-ACOT-MPS factorization scheme at the next-to-leading order to prompt charm production at hadron colliders. It provides a good agreement with experimental data on charm meson production measured by LHCb at 7 and 13 TeV. The low-$p_T$ data are on the margins of the theoretical error bands, emphasizing the importance of including contributions beyond the next-to-leading order.

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arXiv2021

Charting the coming synergy between lattice QCD and high-energy phenomenology

Building upon the PDFSense framework developed in Ref. [1], we perform a comprehensive analysis of the sensitivity of present and future high-energy data to a number of quantities commonly evaluated in lattice gauge theory, with a particular focus on the integrated Mellin moments of nucleon parton distribution functions (PDFs), such as $\langle x \rangle_{u^+ - d^+}$ and $\langle x \rangle_{g}$, as well as $x$-dependent quark quasi-distributions -- in particular, that of the isovector combination. Our results demonstrate the potential for lattice calculations and phenomenological quark distributions informed by high-energy experimental data to cooperatively improve the picture of the nucleon's collinear structure. This will increasingly be the case as computational resources for lattice calculations further expand, and QCD global analyses continue to grow in sophistication. Our sensitivity analysis suggests that a future lepton-hadron collider would be especially instrumental in providing phenomenological constraints to lattice observables.

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arXiv2020

Testing momentum dependence of the nonperturbative hadron structure in a global QCD analysis

We discuss strategies for comparisons of nonperturbative QCD predictions for parton distribution functions (PDFs) with high-energy experiments in the region of large partonic momentum fractions $x$. Analytic functional forms for PDFs cannot be uniquely determined solely based on discrete experimental measurements because of a mathematical property of mimicry of PDF parametrizations that we prove using a representation based on Bézier curves. Predictions of nonperturbative QCD approaches for the $x$ dependence of PDFs instead should be cast in a form that enables decisive comparisons against experimental measurements. Predictions for effective power laws of $(1-x)$ dependence of PDFs may play this role. Expectations for PDFs in a proton based on quark counting rules are compared against the effective power laws of $(1-x)$ dependence satisfied by CT18 next-to-next-to-leading order parton distributions. We comment on implications for studies of PDFs in a pion, in particular on the comparison of nonperturbative approaches with phenomenological PDFs.

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arXiv2020

Hadron structure in high-energy collisions

Parton distribution functions (PDFs) describe the structure of hadrons as composed of quarks and gluons. They are needed to make predictions for short-distance processes in high-energy collisions and are determined by fitting to cross section data. We review definitions of the PDFs and their relations to high-energy cross sections. We focus on the PDFs in protons, but also discuss PDFs in nuclei. We review in some detail the standard statistical treatment needed to fit the PDFs to data using the Hessian method. We discuss tests that can be used to critically examine whether the assumptions are indeed valid. We also present some ideas of what one can do in the case that the tests indicate that the assumptions fail.

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arXiv2020

Probing Nucleons and Nuclei in High Energy Collisions

This volume is a collection of contributions for the 7-week program "Probing Nucleons and Nuclei in High Energy Collisions" that was held at the Institute for Nuclear Theory in Seattle, WA, USA, from October 1 until November 16, 2018. The program was dedicated to the physics of the Electron Ion Collider (EIC), the world's first polarized electron-nucleon (ep) and electron-nucleus (eA) collider to be constructed in the USA. These proceedings are organized by chapters, corresponding to the weeks of the program: Week I, Generalized parton distributions; Week II, Transverse spin and TMDs; Week III, Longitudinal spin; Week IV, Symposium week; Weeks V & VI, eA collisions; Week VII, pA and AA collisions. We hope these proceedings will be useful to readers as a compilation of EIC-related science at the end of the second decade of the XXI century.

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arXiv2020

Probing Nuclear Structure with Future Colliders

Improved knowledge of the nucleon structure is a crucial pathway toward a deeper understanding of the fundamental nature of the QCD interaction, and will enable important future discoveries. The experimental facilities proposed for the next decade offer a tremendous opportunity to advance the precision of our theoretical predictions to unprecedented levels. In this report we briefly highlight some of the recently developed tools and techniques which, together with data from these new colliders, have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the QCD theory in the next decade.

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arXiv2019

PDFSense: Mapping the PDF sensitivity of future facilities (HL-LHC, LHeC, and EIC)

Particle and nuclear physics are moving toward a new generation of experiments to stress-test the Standard Model (SM), search for novel degrees of freedom, and comprehensively map the internal structure of hadrons. Due to the complex nature of QCD and wide array of past, present, and possible future experiments, measurements taken at these next-generation facilities will inhabit an expansive space of high-energy data. Maximizing the impact of each future collider program will depend on identifying its place within this sprawling landscape. As an initial exploration, we use the recently-developed PDFSense framework to assess the PDF sensitivity of two future high-energy facilities --- the high-luminosity upgrade to the LHC (HL-LHC) and the Large Hadron-electron Collider (LHeC) proposal --- as well as the electron-ion collider (EIC) proposed to map the few-GeV quark-hadron transition region. We report that each of these experimental facilities occupies a unique place in the kinematical parameter space with specialized pulls on particular collinear quantities. As such, there is a clear complementarity among these programs, with an opportunity for each to mutually reinforce and inform the others.

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arXiv2019

Mapping the sensitivity of hadronic experiments to nucleon structure

Determinations of the proton's collinear parton distribution functions (PDFs) are emerging with growing precision due to increased experimental activity at facilities like the Large Hadron Collider. While this copious information is valuable, the speed at which it is released makes it difficult to quickly assess its impact on the PDFs, short of performing computationally expensive global fits. As an alternative, we explore new methods for quantifying the potential impact of experimental data on the extraction of proton PDFs. Our approach relies crucially on the Hessian correlation between theory-data residuals and the PDFs themselves, as well as on a newly defined quantity --- the sensitivity --- which represents an extension of the correlation and reflects both PDF-driven and experimental uncertainties. This approach is realized in a new, publicly available analysis package PDFSense, which operates with these statistical measures to identify particularly sensitive experiments, weigh their relative or potential impact on PDFs, and visualize their detailed distributions in a space of the parton momentum fraction $x$ and factorization scale $μ$. This tool offers a new means of understanding the influence of individual measurements in existing fits, as well as a predictive device for directing future fits toward the highest impact data and assumptions. Along the way, many new physics insights can be gained or reinforced. As one of many examples, PDFSense is employed to rank the projected impact of new LHC measurements in jet, vector boson, and $t\bar{t}$ production and leads us to the conclusion that inclusive jet production at the LHC has a potential for playing an indispensable role in future PDF fits. These conclusions are independently verified by preliminarily fitting this experimental information and investigating the constraints they supply using the Lagrange multiplier technique.

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arXiv2018

PDFSense: Mapping the sensitivity of hadronic experiments to nucleon structure

Recent high precision experimental data from a variety of hadronic processes opens new opportunities for determination of the collinear parton distribution functions (PDFs) of the proton. In fact, the wealth of information from experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and others, makes it difficult to quickly assess the impact on the PDFs, short of performing computationally expensive global fits. As an alternative, we explore new methods for quantifying the potential impact of experimental data on the extraction of proton PDFs. Our approach relies crucially on the correlation between theory-data residuals and the PDFs themselves, as well as on a newly defined quantity --- the sensitivity --- which represents an extension of the correlation and reflects both PDF-driven and experimental uncertainties. This approach is realized in a new, publicly available analysis package PDFSense, which operates with these statistical measures to identify particularly sensitive experiments, weigh their relative or potential impact on PDFs, and visualize their detailed distributions in a space of the parton momentum fraction x and factorization scale μ. This tool offers a new means of understanding the influence of individual measurements in existing fits, as well as a predictive device for directing future fits toward the highest impact data and assumptions.

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arXiv2014

Nonperturbative contributions to a resummed leptonic angular distribution in inclusive neutral vector boson production

We present an analysis of nonperturbative contributions to the transverse momentum distribution of $Z/γ^*$ bosons produced at hadron colliders. The new data on the angular distribution $ϕ^*_η$ of Drell-Yan pairs measured at the Tevatron is shown to be in excellent agreement with a perturbative QCD prediction based on the Collins-Soper-Sterman (CSS) resummation formalism at NNLL accuracy. Using these data, we determine the nonperturbative component of the CSS resummed cross section and estimate its dependence on arbitrary resummation scales and other factors. With the scale dependence included at the NNLL level, a significant nonperturbative component is needed to describe the angular data.

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arXiv2013

Nonperturbative contributions to a resummed leptonic angular distribution in inclusive $Z/γ^*$ boson production

We summarize a new analysis of the distribution $ϕ_η^{*}$ of charged leptons produced in decays of $Z$ and $γ^{*}$ bosons in the Collins-Soper-Sterman (CSS) formalism for transverse momentum resummation. By comparing the $ϕ_η^{*}$ distribution measured at the Tevatron with the resummed CSS cross section with approximate ${\cal O}(α_{s}^{2})$ Wilson coefficients, we constrain the magnitude of the nonperturbative Gaussian smearing factor and analyze its uncertainty caused by variations in scale parameters. We find excellent agreement between the $ϕ_η^{*}$ data and our theoretical prediction, provided by the \textsc{ResBos} resummation program. The nonperturbative factor that we obtained can be used to update resummed QCD predictions for precision measurements in inclusive $W$ and $Z$ production and for comparisons to various models of nonperturbative dynamics.

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arXiv2013

Charm quark mass dependence in a global QCD analysis

We study the effect of the charm quark mass in the CTEQ global analysis of parton distribution functions (PDFs) of the proton. Constraints on the $\bar{\rm MS}$ mass of the charm quark are examined at the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) accuracy in the S-ACOT-$χ$ heavy-quark factorization scheme. The value of the charm quark mass from the hadronic scattering data in the CT10 NNLO fit, including semiinclusive charm production in DIS at HERA collider, is found to agree with the world average value. Various approaches for constraining $m_{c}$ in the global analysis and impact on LHC cross sections are reviewed.

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