PT Journal AU ATLAS Collaboration (Aad, Gea Aparisi Pozo, JA Bailey, AJ Cabrera Urban, S Cardillo, F Castillo, FL Castillo Gimenez, V Costa, MJ Didenko, M Escobar, C Estrada Pastor, O Fiorini, L Fullana Torregrosa, E Fuster, J Garcia, C Garcia Navarro, JE Gonzalez de la Hoz, S Gonzalvo Rodriguez, GR Guerrero Rojas, JGR Higon-Rodriguez, E Lacasta, C Lozano Bahilo, JJ Mamuzic, J Marti-Garcia, S Martinez Agullo, P Miralles Lopez, M Mitsou, VA Moreno Llacer, M Navarro-Gonzalez, J Poveda, J Prades IbaƱez, A Rodriguez Bosca, S Ruiz-Martinez, A Sabatini, P Salt, J Santra, A Sanchez Sebastian, V Sayago Galvan, I Soldevila, U Sanchez, J Torro Pastor, E Valero, A Valls Ferrer, JA Villaplana Perez, M Vos, M TI Measurement of the production cross section of pairs of isolated photons in pp collisions at 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector SO Journal of High Energy Physics JI J. High Energy Phys. PY 2021 BP 169 EP 53pp VL 11 IS 11 DI 10.1007/JHEP11(2021)169 LA English DE Hadron-Hadron scattering (experiments); photon production; proton-proton scattering; QCD AB A measurement of prompt photon-pair production in proton-proton collisions at root s = 13 TeV is presented. The data were recorded by the ATLAS detector at the LHC with an integrated luminosity of 139 fb(-1). Events with two photons in the wellinstrumented region of the detector are selected. The photons are required to be isolated and have a transverse momentum of p(T,gamma 1(2)) > 40 (30) GeV for the leading (sub-leading) photon. The differential cross sections as functions of several observables for the diphoton system are measured and compared with theoretical predictions from state-of-the-art Monte Carlo and fixed-order calculations. The QCD predictions from next-to-next-to-leadingorder calculations and multi-leg merged calculations are able to describe the measured integrated and differential cross sections within uncertainties, whereas lower-order calculations show significant deviations, demonstrating that higher-order perturbative QCD corrections are crucial for this process. The resummed predictions with parton showers additionally provide an excellent description of the low transverse-momentum regime of the diphoton system. ER