A phenomenological analysis of LHC neutrino scattering at NLO accuracy matched to parton showers

Abstract

Abstract We perform a detailed phenomenological study of high-energy neutrino deep inelastic scattering (DIS) focused on LHC far-forward experiments such as FASER $$\nu $$ ν 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 $$\nu $$ ν and SND@LHC as well as for two experiments of the proposed Forward Physics Facility (FPF), FASER $$\nu $$ ν 2 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.