Room Caldirola (Milano Statale)
Description: Since more than a century, nuclear targets have been used to study the inner structure of the visible matter, and the advent of modern colliders like the LHC allowed for very precise measurements that give access to the PDFs, i.e.~the distribution of quarks and gluons into protons. Asymmetric hadronic reactions, such as electron-nucleus or proton-nucleus collisions, have revealed that nuclear parton distributions (nPDFs) are modified with respect to the ones for a free nucleon, showing a richer dynamics yet to be fully understood. Current and future experimental programs strongly require modern and flexible event generators for collisions involving heavy ions or exotic beams. Hence, the extension of present generators to the case of asymmetric collisions is highly desirable.
In this talk, we present the implementation of automated NLO computations for asymmetric hadron-hadron collisions in the MadGraph5_aMC@NLO (MG5) framework. This new features allows for the usage of two different PDFs for the two initial state beams and is able to automatically compute, in a single run, ratios of cross section, the so-called nuclear modification factors, that give access to quarks and gluons nPDFs. An impact study for future measurements of D- and B-mesons production in proton-nucleus scattering at the fixed-target experiments at LHCb, done adopting this new MG5 version, will be also discussed.