Extent of sensitivity of single photon production to parton distribution functions

We have studied the production of single isolated prompt photons in high-energy proton–proton collisions at the RHIC ( (sqrt {s}) = 200 GeV) and the LHC ( (sqrt {s}) = 7 TeV) energies within the framework of perturbative QCD upto next-to leading order of strong coupling (α _s). We have used five different parametrizations of parton distribution function (PDF) starting from the old CTEQ4M to the new CT10 distributions and compared our results with the recent single-prompt photon data from the PHENIX and the CMS Collaborations. The prompt photon cross-section is found to be described equally well by all the PDFs within the experimental errors at the RHIC and the LHC energies. The deviation in the single-prompt photon yield for different PDF sets is within ±20% when compared to CTEQ4M, indicating the upper bound of uncertainty in determining the gluon density. The diphoton measurement could be a potential candidate to constrain the gluon distribution inside the proton.