Nuclear Theory/RIKEN Seminar

Pythia 8 is a general-purpose Monte-Carlo event generator widely used to simulate high-energy proton-proton collisions at the LHC. Recently it has been extended to handle also other collision systems involving lepton and heavy-ion beams. In this seminar I will review the current Pythia 8 capabilities in processes relevant to an Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) and discuss about the projected future improvements. The relevant processes can be divided into two regions based on the virtuality of the intermediate photon: deeply inelastic scattering (DIS) at high virtualities and photoproduction at low virtualities. I will begin with an introduction of the event generation steps in Pythia 8 and then briefly discuss how the DIS processes can be simulated. Then I present our photoproduction framework and compare the results to the HERA data for charged-hadron and dijet production in lepton-proton collisions. In particular I discuss about the role of multiparton interactions in photon-proton interactions with resolved photons and how these can be constrained with the existing HERA data. Then I discuss how the same framework can be applied to ultra-peripheral heavy-ion collisions at the LHC where one can study high-energy photon-nucleus interactions in a kinematic region comparable to EIC. Finally I will show our first predictions for dijet production in these events and quantify the contribution of diffractive events according to the hard diffractionmodel that has been recently implemented into Pythia 8.