Recently, the authoritative journal in the field of physics,Physical Review Letters(PRL), haspublished the research achievements of Zhang Yujie and Shao Huasheng, respectivelyfrom the School of Physics and Nuclear Energy Engineering of Beihang University, and the Laboratory of High Energy Physics of the French Academy of Sciences, titled "Triple Prompt J/ψHadroproduction as a Hard Probe of Multiple-Parton Scatterings" [PRL 122, 192002 (2019)], with Zhang Yujie as the corresponding author, and the School of Physics and Nuclear Energy Engineering of Beihang as the unit of the corresponding author.
Due to the quantum fluctuation effect, a proton contains many partons, which are correlated with each other. The high-energy proton collider can measure the partons inside the proton and their correlation. In 2016, Zhang Yujie and Shao Huasheng found that the correlation between double-partons might be seven times stronger than traditional estimation [PRL117, 062001 (2016)], which indicated that the correlation between triple-partons might also be much stronger than former estimation. However, in general, the correlation between triple-partons is concealed by the interaction between single-partons and the strong noise of correlation between double-partons. Through extremely complicated calculations, this study is the first one to comprehensively present the complete theoretical predictions including single-, double-, and triple-parton scattering (TPS) contribution, the first to offer experimental method in distinguishing single-, double-, and triple-parton scattering contribution, and the first to indicate that even if the correlation may be weak under traditional prediction, evidence of TPS contribution can still be found from the data of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
This study predicts that there will be the signal of at least 100 times TPS contribution in the 2×1015 collisions of both the CMS and Atlas detectors at the LHC of the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The intensity of triple-parton correlation can be obtained by looking for this signal. At present, the CMS team led by Dr. Yuan Li of Beihang University and the Atlas team of Rutherford Appleton Laboratory are cooperating with Zhang Yujie and Shao Huasheng to find this signal and to measure the intensity of triple-parton correlation.
The research article is available at:
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.192002
