arXiv subjects

Valerio Bertone

Publications and source records attributed to Valerio Bertone.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

PHOTON-2017 conference proceedings

This document collects the proceedings of the PHOTON 2017 conference ("International Conference on the Structure and the Interactions of the Photon", including the 22th "International Workshop on Photon-Photon Collisions", and the "International Workshop on High Energy Photon Colliders") held at CERN (Geneva) in May 2017. The latest experimental and theoretical developments on the topics of the PHOTON conference series are covered: (i) $γ\,γ$ processes in e$^+$e$^-$, proton-proton (pp) and nucleus-nucleus (AA) collisions at current and future colliders, (ii) $γ$-hadron interactions in e$^\pm$p, pp, and AA collisions, (iii) final-state photon production (including Standard Model studies and searches beyond it) in pp and AA collisions, and (iv) high-energy $γ$-ray astrophysics. These proceedings are dedicated to the memory of Maria Krawczyk.

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arXiv2018

Neutrino Telescopes as QCD Microscopes

We present state-of-the-art predictions for the ultra-high energy (UHE) neutrino-nucleus cross-sections in charged- and neutral-current scattering. The calculation is performed in the framework of collinear factorisation at NNLO, extended to include the resummation of small-$x$ BFKL effects. Further improvements are made by accounting for the free-nucleon PDF constraints provided by $D$-meson data from LHCb and assessing the impact of nuclear corrections and heavy-quark mass effects. The calculations presented here should play an important role in the interpretation of future data from neutrino telescopes such as IceCube and KM3NET, and highlight the opportunities that astroparticle experiments offer to study the strong interactions.

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arXiv2018

Impact of low-$x$ resummation on QCD analysis of HERA data

Fits to the final combined HERA deep-inelastic scattering cross-section data within the conventional DGLAP framework of QCD have shown some tension at low $x$ and low $Q^2$. A resolution of this tension incorporating $\ln(1/x)$-resummation terms into the HERAPDF fits is investigated using the xFitter program. The kinematic region where this resummation is important is delineated. Such high-energy resummation not only gives a better description of the data, particularly of the longitudinal structure function $F_L$, it also results in a gluon PDF which is steeply rising at low $x$ for low scales, $Q^2 \simeq 2.5$ GeV$^2$, contrary to the fixed-order NLO and NNLO gluon PDF.

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arXiv2018

Illuminating the photon content of the proton within a global PDF analysis

Precision phenomenology at the LHC requires accounting for both higher-order QCD and electroweak corrections as well as for photon-initiated subprocesses. Building upon the recent NNPDF3.1 fit, in this work the photon content of the proton is determined within a global analysis supplemented by the LUXqed constraint relating the photon PDF to lepton-proton scattering structure functions: NNPDF3.1luxQED. The uncertainties on the resulting photon PDF are at the level of a few percent, with photons carrying up to 0.5% of the proton's momentum. We study the phenomenological implications of NNPDF3.1luxQED at the LHC for Drell-Yan, vector boson pair, top quark pair, and Higgs plus vector boson production. We find that photon-initiated contributions can be significant for many processes, leading to corrections of up to 20%. Our results represent a state-of-the-art determination of the partonic structure of the proton including its photon component.

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arXiv2018

Parton distributions with small-x resummation: evidence for BFKL dynamics in HERA data

We present a determination of the parton distribution functions of the proton in which NLO and NNLO fixed-order calculations are supplemented by NLLx small-x resummation. Deep inelastic structure functions are computed consistently at NLO+NLLx or NNLO+NLLx, while for hadronic processes small-x resummation is included only in the PDF evolution, with kinematic cuts introduced to ensure the fitted data lie in a region where the fixed-order calculation of the hard cross-sections is reliable. In all other respects, the fits use the same methodology and are based on the same global dataset as the recent NNPDF3.1 analysis. We demonstrate that the inclusion of small-x resummation leads to a quantitative improvement in the perturbative description of the HERA inclusive and charm-production reduced cross-sections in the small x region. The impact of the resummation in our fits is greater at NNLO than at NLO, because fixed-order calculations have a perturbative instability at small x due to large logarithms that can be cured by resummation. We explore the phenomenological implications of PDF sets with small-x resummation for the longitudinal structure function $F_L$ at HERA, for parton luminosities and LHC benchmark cross-sections, for ultra-high energy neutrino-nucleus cross-sections, and for future high-energy lepton-proton colliders such as the LHeC.

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arXiv2017

A C++ interface to QCDNUM

In this document we report on the recent development of a C++ interface to the FORTRAN-based evolution program QCDNUM. A short description of the interface is given with a few basic examples of its usage.

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arXiv2017

Heavy-flavor parton distributions without heavy-flavor matching prescriptions

We show that the well-known obstacle for working with the zero-mass variable flavor number scheme, namely, the omission of O(1) mass power corrections close to the conventional heavy flavor matching point (HFMP) mu_b=m, can be easily overcome. For this it is sufficient to take advantage of the freedom in choosing the position of the HFMP. We demonstrate that by choosing a sufficiently large HFMP, which could be as large as 10 times the mass of the heavy quark, one can achieve the following improvements: 1) above the HFMP the size of missing power corrections O(m) is restricted by the value of mu_b and, therefore, the error associated with their omission can be made negligible; 2) additional prescriptions for the definition of cross-sections are not required; 3) the resummation accuracy is maintained and 4) contrary to the common lore we find that the discontinuity of alpha_s and pdfs across thresholds leads to improved continuity in predictions for observables. We have considered a large set of proton-proton and electron-proton collider processes, many through NNLO QCD, that demonstrate the broad applicability of our proposal.

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arXiv2017

Parton distributions from high-precision collider data

We present a new set of parton distributions, NNPDF3.1, which updates NNPDF3.0, the first global set of PDFs determined using a methodology validated by a closure test. The update is motivated by recent progress in methodology and available data, and involves both. On the methodological side, we now parametrize and determine the charm PDF alongside the light quarks and gluon ones, thereby increasing from seven to eight the number of independent PDFs. On the data side, we now include the D0 electron and muon W asymmetries from the final Tevatron dataset, the complete LHCb measurements of W and Z production in the forward region at 7 and 8 TeV, and new ATLAS and CMS measurements of inclusive jet and electroweak boson production. We also include for the first time top-quark pair differential distributions and the transverse momentum of the Z bosons from ATLAS and CMS. We investigate the impact of parametrizing charm and provide evidence that the accuracy and stability of the PDFs are thereby improved. We study the impact of the new data by producing a variety of determinations based on reduced datasets. We find that both improvements have a significant impact on the PDFs, with some substantial reductions in uncertainties, but with the new PDFs generally in agreement with the previous set at the one sigma level. The most significant changes are seen in the light-quark flavor separation, and in increased precision in the determination of the gluon. We explore the implications of NNPDF3.1 for LHC phenomenology at Run II, compare with recent LHC measurements at 13 TeV, provide updated predictions for Higgs production cross-sections and discuss the strangeness and charm content of the proton in light of our improved dataset and methodology. The NNPDF3.1 PDFs are delivered for the first time both as Hessian sets, and as optimized Monte Carlo sets with a compressed number of replicas.

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arXiv2017

APFEL++: A new PDF evolution library in C++

I present a preliminary version of {\tt APFEL++}, a C++ rewriting of the Fortran 77 evolution code {\tt APFEL}. In this contribution I discuss the new philosophy adopted for the numerical computation of the convolutions, demonstrate the ability to reproduce old results in an accurate and fast way, and present an original application to the computation of the semi-inclusive deep-inelastic-scattering cross section to next-to-leading order in QCD.

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arXiv2017

The photon PDF from high-mass Drell-Yan data at the LHC

I present a determination of the photon PDF from a fit to the recent ATLAS measurements of high-mass Drell-Yan lepton-pair production at $\sqrt{s} = 8$ TeV. This analysis is based on the {\tt xFitter} framework interfaced to the {\tt APFEL} program, that accounts for NLO QED effects, and to the {\tt aMCfast} code to account for the photon-initiated contributions within {\tt MadGraph5\_aMC@NLO}. The result is compared with other recent determinations of the photon PDF finding a general good agreement.

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arXiv2017

A determination of the fragmentation functions of pions, kaons, and protons with faithful uncertainties

We present NNFF1.0, a new determination of the fragmentation functions (FFs) of charged pions, charged kaons, and protons/antiprotons from an analysis of single-inclusive hadron production data in electron-positron annihilation. This determination, performed at leading, next-to-leading, and next-to-next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD, is based on the NNPDF methodology, a fitting framework designed to provide a statistically sound representation of FF uncertainties and to minimise any procedural bias. We discuss novel aspects of the methodology used in this analysis, namely an optimised parametrisation of FFs and a more efficient $χ^2$ minimisation strategy, and validate the FF fitting procedure by means of closure tests. We then present the NNFF1.0 sets, and discuss their fit quality, their perturbative convergence, and their stability upon variations of the kinematic cuts and the fitted dataset. We find that the systematic inclusion of higher-order QCD corrections significantly improves the description of the data, especially in the small-$z$ region. We compare the NNFF1.0 sets to other recent sets of FFs, finding in general a reasonable agreement, but also important differences. Together with existing sets of unpolarised and polarised parton distribution functions (PDFs), FFs and PDFs are now available from a common fitting framework for the first time.

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arXiv2016

A Determination of the Charm Content of the Proton

We present an unbiased determination of the charm content of the proton, in which the charm parton distribution function (PDF) is parametrized on the same footing as the light quarks and the gluon in a global PDF analysis. This determination relies on the calculation of deep-inelastic structure functions in the FONLL scheme, generalized to account for massive charm-initiated contributions. In contrast to the usual situation in which the charm PDF is assumed to be generated perturbatively by pair radiation off gluons and light quarks, vanishing at a scale set by the value of the charm mass m_c, we find that the fitted charm PDF vanishes within uncertainties at a scale Q~1.5 GeV for all x<~0.1, independent of the value of m_c used in the coefficient functions. We also find some evidence that the charm PDF at large x>~0.1 and low scales does not vanish, but rather has an "intrinsic" component, very weakly scale dependent and almost independent of the value of m_c, carrying about 1% of the total momentum of the proton. The uncertainties in all other PDFs are only slightly increased by the inclusion of fitted charm, while the dependence of these PDFs on m_c is significantly reduced. When the EMC charm structure function dataset is included, it is well described by the fit, and PDF uncertainties in the fitted charm PDF are significantly reduced, though we verify that excluding the EMC data does not qualitatively modify any of our findings. The increased stability with respect to m_c persists at high scales and is the main implication of our results for LHC phenomenology. Fitting the charm PDF modifies the predictions for processes such as high p_T and large rapidity charm pair production and Z+c production, and thus we expect that future LHC data will further constrain the charm content of the proton.

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arXiv2016

A determination of mc(mc) from HERA data using a matched heavy-flavor scheme

The charm quark mass is one of the fundamental parameters of the Standard Model Lagrangian. In this work we present a determination of the MSbar charm mass from a fit to the inclusive and charm HERA deep-inelastic structure function data. The analysis is performed within the xFitter framework, with structure functions computed in the FONLL general-mass scheme as implemented in APFEL. In the case of the FONLL-C scheme, we obtain mc(mc) = 1.335 +- 0.043(exp) +0.019 -0.000(param) +0.011 -0.008(mod) +0.033 -0.008(th) GeV. We also perform an analogous determination in the fixed-flavor-number scheme at next-to-leading order, finding mc(mc) = 1.318 +- 0.054(exp) +0.011 -0.010(param) +0.015 -0.019(mod) +0.045 -0.004(th) GeV, compatible with the FONLL-C value. Our results are consistent with previous determinations from DIS data as well as with the PDG world average.

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arXiv2016

APFELgrid: a high performance tool for parton density determinations

We present a new software package designed to reduce the computational burden of hadron collider measurements in Parton Distribution Function (PDF) fits. The APFELgrid package converts interpolated weight tables provided by APPLgrid files into a more efficient format for PDF fitting by the combination with PDF and $α_s$ evolution factors provided by APFEL. This combination significantly reduces the number of operations required to perform the calculation of hadronic observables in PDF fits and simplifies the structure of the calculation into a readily optimised scalar product. We demonstrate that our technique can lead to a substantial speed improvement when compared to existing methods without any reduction in numerical accuracy.

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arXiv2016

Intrinsic charm in a matched general-mass scheme

The FONLL general-mass variable-flavour number scheme provides a framework for the matching of a calculation in which a heavy quark is treated as a massless parton to one in which the mass dependence is retained throughout. We describe how the usual formulation of FONLL can be extended in such a way that the heavy quark parton distribution functions are freely parameterized at some initial scale, rather than being generated entirely perturbatively. We specifically consider the case of deep-inelastic scattering, in view of applications to PDF determination, and the possible impact of a fitted charm quark distribution on $F_2^c$ is assessed.

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arXiv2015

On the Impact of Lepton PDFs

In this paper we discuss the effect of the complete leading-order QED corrections to the DGLAP equations in the perturbative evolution of parton distribution functions (PDFs). This requires the extension of the purely QCD DGLAP evolution, including a PDF for the photons and, consistently, also for the charged leptons $e^{\pm}$, $μ^\pm$ and $τ^\pm$. We present the implementation of the QED-corrected DGLAP evolution in the presence of photon and lepton PDFs in the APFEL program and, by means of different assumptions for the initial scale PDFs, we produce for the first time PDF sets containing charged lepton distributions. We also present phenomenological studies that aim to assess the impact of the presence of lepton PDFs in the proton for some relevant SM (and BSM) processes at the LHC at 13 TeV and the FCC-hh at 100 TeV. The impact of the photon PDF is also outlined for those processes.

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arXiv2015

Doped Parton Distributions

Calculations of high-energy processes involving the production of b-quarks are typically performed in two different ways, the massive four-flavour scheme (4FS) and the massless five-flavour scheme (5FS). For processes where the combination of the 4FS and 5FS results into a matched calculation is technically difficult, it is possible to define a hybrid scheme known as the doped scheme, where above the b-quark threshold the strong coupling runs with $n_f=5$, as in the massless calculation, while the DGLAP splitting functions are those of the $n_f=4$ scheme. In this contribution we present NNPDF3.0 PDF sets in this doped scheme, compare them with the corresponding 4FS and 5FS sets, and discuss their relevance for LHC phenomenology.

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arXiv2015

Parton distributions with threshold resummation

We construct a set of parton distribution functions (PDFs) in which fixed-order NLO and NNLO calculations are supplemented with soft-gluon (threshold) resummation up to NLL and NNLL accuracy respectively, suitable for use in conjunction with any QCD calculation in which threshold resummation is included at the level of partonic cross sections. These resummed PDF sets, based on the NNPDF3.0 analysis, are extracted from deep-inelastic scattering, Drell-Yan, and top quark pair production data, for which resummed calculations can be consistently used. We find that, close to threshold, the inclusion of resummed PDFs can partially compensate the enhancement in resummed matrix elements, leading to resummed hadronic cross-sections closer to the fixed-order calculation. On the other hand, far from threshold, resummed PDFs reduce to their fixed-order counterparts. Our results demonstrate the need for a consistent use of resummed PDFs in resummed calculations.

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