Monte Carlo event generation of photon-photon collisions at colliders

In addition to being interesting in itself, the photon-photon interactions will be an inevitable background for the future electron-positron colliders. Thus to be able to quantify the potential of future electron-positron colliders it is important to have an accurate description of these collisions. Here we present our ongoing work to implement the photon-photon collisions in the Pythia 8 event generator. First we introduce photon PDFs in general and then discuss in more detail one particular set we have used in our studies. Then we will discuss how the parton-shower algorithm in Pythia 8 is modified in case of photon beams and how the beam remnants are constructed. Finally a brief outlook on future developments is given.Comment: Talk presented at PHOTON2015 conference, June 15 - 19, 2015, Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics (BINP), Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Science, Novosibirsk, Russi

Electron-Ion Physics with the LHeC

The Large Hadron Electron Collider (LHeC) project is the proposal to use the existing LHC proton/ion beams and construct a new electron beam line to perform high-energy electron-proton/ion collisions. In this talk, we consider some of the physics topics that could be studied in the electron-ion mode. In particular, we estimate how much the current nuclear parton distribution fits could be improved with the deeply inelastic scattering measurements at the LHeC by including pseudodata into a global analysis. In addition, we discuss briefly other topics that would help to better understand some aspects of heavy-ion collisions, namely small-$x$ physics and hadron production with a nuclear target.Comment: Talk presented at DIS2015 conference, April 27 - May 1, 2015, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. v2: Updated reference lis

nPDF constraints from the Large Hadron Electron Collider

An updated analysis regarding the expected nuclear PDF constraints from the future Large Hadron Electron Collider (LHeC) experiment is presented. The new study is based on a more flexible small-$x$ parametrization which provides less biased uncertainty estimates in the region where there are currently no data constraints. The effect of the LHeC is quantified by directly including a sample of pseudodata according to the expected precision of this planned experiment. As a result, a significant reduction of the small-$x$ uncertainties in sea quarks and gluons is observed.Comment: Talk presented at DIS2016 conference, April 11 - April 15, 2016, DESY, Hamburg, German

Recent Pythia 8 developments: Hard diffraction, Colour reconnection and γγ\gamma\gamma collisions

An overview of recent developments in \pythia~8 is given. First the new hard diffraction model, which is implemented as a part of the multiparton interactions (MPI) framework, is discussed. Then the new colour reconnection model, which includes beyond leading colour effects that can become important when MPI are present, is briefly reviewed. As a last topic an introduction is given to our implementation of photon-photon collisions. In particular photon PDFs, required modifications for the initial state radiation algorithm and beam remnant handling with photon beams is discussed.Comment: Contribution to proceedings of 7th International Workshop on Multiple Partonic Interactions at the LHC, 23 - 27 November 2015, Miramare, Trieste, Ital

Hadroproduction of open heavy flavour for PDF analyses

Due to the large masses of the charm and bottom quarks, their production cross sections are calculable within the perturbative QCD. This makes the heavy-quark mesons important observables in high-energy collisions of protons and nuclei. However, the available calculations for heavy-flavored-meson hadroproduction have been somewhat problematic in reliably describing the cross sections across the full kinematic range from zero to very high pT. This has put some question marks on the robustness of LHC heavy-flavored-meson measurements in studying the partonic structure of the colliding hadrons and nuclei. Here, we introduce SACOT-mT - a novel scheme for open heavy-flavour hadroproduction within the general-mass variable-flavour-number formalism that solves this problem. The introduced scheme is an analogue of the SACOT-χ scheme often used for deeply-inelastic scattering in global analyses of PDFs.Peer reviewe