Precision Photon-Plus-Jet Production with POWHEG and MiNLO
NLO QCD predictions for prompt photons produced with one or two jets, matched to parton showers via POWHEG, with MiNLO-based studies for processes with several colored legs.
Prompt photon production is highly sensitive to the parton content of the colliding protons (or nuclei) and serves as a key baseline for quark-gluon-plasma phenomenology. This research improves predictions for direct photon production accompanied by QCD jets — in particular photon production with two jets — using the POWHEG method matched to parton showers, extending earlier single-jet calculations.
Work in this area includes implementing the photon-plus-two-jets process in POWHEG BOX V2 at next-to-leading order QCD, studying how different parton-shower models describe photon fragmentation and photon-jet angular correlations, and comparing predictions against ATLAS data. A related strand investigates MiNLO-type Sudakov factors for processes with three colored legs, where the choice of resummation scale and the treatment of soft wide-angle radiation are not yet settled; this numerical work is exploratory and is reported here only once results are validated and public.
Published results
- Prompt Photon Production with Two Jets in POWHEG (JHEP 02 (2025) 125)
Ongoing and future work
- MiNLO Sudakov-scale choices and soft wide-angle radiation for photon-plus-jets processes with three colored legs.
- Interplay between photon isolation and QED/QCD radiation.