Examination of direct-photon and pion production in proton-nucleon collisions

We present a study of inclusive direct-photon and pion production in hadronic interactions, focusing on a comparison of the ratio of $\gamma /{\pi }^0$ yields with expectations from next-to-leading order perturbative QCD. We also examine the impact of a phenomenological model involving $k_T$ smearing (which approximates effects of additional soft-gluon emission) on absolute predictions for photon and pion production and their ratio.