Double Parton Scattering

Group members: James Stirling

The composite nature of hadrons means that it is possible to have two parton-parton interactions in a single hadron-hadron collision. This process is known as double parton scattering. Double parton scattering could produce important backgrounds to interesting single scattering processes such as Higgs boson production and decay at the LHC. It is also interesting to study in its own right as it reveals information about correlations between pairs of partons in the proton.

We study how simultaneous description of two partons inside a proton could be improved by, for example, including momentum and quark number conservation in the double parton distributions. Various strategies to observe double parton scatterings at the LHC are also being actively studied.