The production of isolated photons in PbPb and pp collisions at √s_NN = 5.02 TeV
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Abstract
The transverse energy ( ({E}{T}^{\gamma }) ) spectra of photons isolated from other particles are measured using proton-proton (pp) and lead-lead (PbPb) collisions at the LHC at (\sqrt{{s}{\mathrm{NN}}}) = 5.02 TeV with integrated luminosities of 27.4 pb(^{−1}) and 404 μb(^{−1}) for pp and PbPb data, respectively. The results are presented for photons with 25 < ({E}_{T}^{\gamma }) < 200 GeV in the pseudorapidity range |η| < 1.44, and for different centrality intervals for PbPb collisions. Photon production in PbPb collisions is consistent with that in pp collisions scaled by the number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions, demonstrating that photons do not interact with the quark-gluon plasma. Therefore, isolated photons can provide information about the initial energy of the associated parton in photon+jet measurements. The results are compared with predictions from the next-to-leading-order jetphox generator for different parton distribution functions (PDFs) and nuclear PDFs (nPDFs). The comparisons can help to constrain the nPDFs global fits.