TMD parton showers for associated $\gamma$+jet production in electron-proton collisions at high energies

Abstract

An earlier developed $k_T$-factorization framework to calculate the associated prompt photon and hadronic jets production cross sections at high energies is extended now to the electron-proton deep inelastic scattering. The proposed method is based on joint usage of the PEGASUS and CASCADE Monte-Carlo event generators, which deal with the transverse momentum dependent (TMD) gluon and quark densities in a proton. First of them, PEGASUS, is applied to produce off-shell photon-gluon fusion events. Then, to properly simulate the kinematics of the produced jets, the TMD parton shower algorithm implemented into the CASCADE is used. We demonstrate basic features of the approach considering latest H1 and ZEUS data on prompt photon plus jet production at low $Q^2$ collected at HERA. We achieve a good description of the measurements and point out that a correct simulation of parton showers is essential for studying non-inclusive processes at high energies within the TMD-based approaches.