https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-024-13386-1
Regular Article
A phenomenological analysis of LHC neutrino scattering at NLO accuracy matched to parton showers
1
Nikhef Theory Group, Science Park 105, 1098 XG, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2
Theoretical Physics Department, CERN, Esplanade des Particules 1, Meyrin, Switzerland
3
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Vrije Universiteit, 1081 HV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Received:
22
July
2024
Accepted:
16
September
2024
Published online:
18
November
2024
We perform a detailed phenomenological study of high-energy neutrino deep inelastic scattering (DIS) focused on LHC far-forward experiments such as FASER
and SND@LHC. To this aim, we parametrise the neutrino fluxes reaching these LHC far-forward experiments in terms of ‘neutrino PDFs’ encoding their energy and rapidity dependence by means of the LHAPDF framework. We integrate these neutrino PDFs in the recently developed POWHEG-BOX-RES implementation of neutrino-induced DIS to produce predictions accurate at next-to-leading order (NLO) in the QCD coupling matched to parton showers (PS) with Pythia8. We present NLO+PS predictions for final-state distributions within the acceptance for FASER and SND@LHC as well as for two experiments of the proposed Forward Physics Facility (FPF), FASER2 and FLArE. We quantify the impact of NLO QCD corrections, of the parton showering and hadronisation settings in Pythia8, of the QED shower, and of the incoming neutrino flavour for the description of these observables, and compare our predictions with the GENIE neutrino event generator. Our work demonstrates the relevance of modern higher-order event generators to achieve the key scientific targets of the LHC neutrino experiments.
© The Author(s) 2024
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Funded by SCOAP3.
