Speaker
Description
High-energy collisions of hadrons (protons and nuclei) at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are characterized by multiple interactions of their underlying partonic constituents. The simultaneous production of several particles with large transverse momentum and/or mass ($p_\mathrm{T}, m \gg 3$~GeV) in different independent hard partonic interactions has attracted an increasing interest in collider physics as a means to study the energy evolution of the parton profile of the nucleons in the transverse direction, to probe the generalized parton densities of hadrons, and to investigate the role of partonic correlations in the hadronic wave functions.
Thanks to the large center-of-mass and integrated luminosities available at the LHC, the production of three independent parton scatterings in a given proton-proton (p-p) or proton-nucleus (p-Pb) collision is measurable for the first time. This work presents results on the production of six jets in p-p and p-Pb collisions as a means to study Triple Parton Scattering (TPS) processes. The work exploits a multi-variate-analysis based on different kinematic properties of the outgoing jets to separate the TPS signal from single- and double-parton scattering processes, and obtain the expected statistical significances for their observation.