Nuclear parton density modifications from low-mass lepton pair production at the LHC

Abstract

In this article, we investigate the potential of low-mass lepton pair production in proton-ion collisions at the LHC to constrain nuclear modifications of parton densities. Similarly to prompt photon production, the transverse momentum spectrum is shown to be dominated by the QCD Compton process, but has virtually no fragmentation or isolation uncertainties. Depending on the orientation of the proton and ion beams and on the use of central or forward detector components, all interesting regions of nuclear effects (shadowing, antishadowing, isospin and EMC effects) can be probed. Ratios of cross sections allow to eliminate theoretical scale and bare-proton parton density errors as well as many experimental systematic uncertainties.