QCD@LHC 2026

Jet production in photon-lead collisions at NLO+PS accuracy

Not scheduled

20m

University of Oxford

Standard slot Low-scale QCD, including heavy-ion physics Low-scale QCD, including heavy-ion physics

Speaker

Peter Meinzinger (Zürich University)

Description

Ultraperipheral Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC produce quasi-real photons reaching high energies, making photonuclear jet production a probe of the partonic structure of both the nucleus and the photon. We present NLO+PS predictions for photonuclear jet production matched to the observables of the ATLAS UPC Pb+Pb measurement at sqrt(s_NN) = 5.02 TeV. This provides the parton-shower-matched calculation identified as necessary for incorporating this data into global PDF fits. We quantify and compare scale, photon-PDF, and nuclear-PDF uncertainties across the measured phase space. These results are directly relevant to upcoming global fits of both nuclear and photon PDFs, with implications extending to the Electron-Ion Collider programme.