Light-nuclei gluons from dijet production in proton-oxygen collisions

The prospects of measuring a single-differential dijet cross section during the proposed short proton-oxygen data taking at LHC Run 3 are studied using next-to-leading-order perturbative QCD predictions. With reasonable experimental cuts and luminosity estimates, such a measurement is found to be feasible, and a few inverse nanobarns of integrated luminosity is estimated to be enough to yield new constraints on parton distribution functions (PDFs) of light nuclei. In the absence of a dedicated proton-proton reference, a mixed-energy nuclear modification ratio is proposed for cancelling free-proton PDF uncertainties to obtain a direct access to the nuclear modifications of the parton distributions in oxygen.