Measurements of photo-nuclear jet production in Pb plus Pb collisions with ATLAS

Abstract

Ultra-peripheral heavy ion collisions provide a unique opportunity to study the parton distributions in the colliding nuclei via the measurement of photo-nuclear jet production. An analysis of jet production in ultra-peripheral Pb+Pb collisions at root S-NN = 5.02 TeV performed using data collected with the ATLAS detector in 2015 is described. The data set corresponds to a total Pb+Pb integrated luminosity of 0.38 nb(-1). The ultra-peripheral collisions are selected using a combination of forward neutron and rapidity gap requirements. The cross-sections, not unfolded for detector response, are compared to results from PYTHIA Monte Carlo simulations re-weighted to match a photon spectrum obtained from the STARLIGHT model. Qualitative agreement between data and these simulations is observed over a broad kinematic range suggesting that using these collisions to measure nuclear parton distributions is experimentally realisable.