Probing the small-x nuclear gluon distributions with isolated photons at forward rapidities in p plus Pb collisions at the LHC

Inclusive direct photon production in p+Pb collisions at the LHC is studied within the NLO perturbative QCD. Our aim is to quantify the dominant x regions probed at different rapidities and to identify the best conditions for testing the nuclear gluon parton distribution functions (nPDFs) at small x. A comparison to the inclusive pion production reveals that from these two processes the photons carry more sensitivity to the small-x partons and that this sensitivity can be further increased by imposing an isolation cut for the photon events. The details of the isolation criteria, however, seem to make only a small difference to the studied x sensitivity and have practically no effect on the expected nuclear modifications. We consider also the yield asymmetry between forward and backward rapidities which can be used to probe the nPDFs irrespectively of whether an accurate p+p baseline is available.