Inclusive dijet photoproduction in ultraperipheral heavy ion collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in next-to-leading order QCD

Abstract

We compute the cross section of inclusive dijet photoproduction in ultraperipheral Pb-Pb collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider using next-to-leading order perturbative QCD. We demonstrate that our theoretical calculations provide a good description of various kinematic distributions measured by the ATLAS Collaboration. We find that the calculated dijet photoproduction cross section is sensitive to nuclear modifications of parton distribution functions (PDFs) at the level of 10% to 20%. Hence, this process can be used to reduce uncertainties in the determination of these nuclear PDFs, whose current magnitude is comparable to the size of the calculated nuclear modifications of the dijet photoproduction cross section.