Impact of Heavy Quark Masses on Parton Distributions and LHC Phenomenology

By R. Ball, Valerio Bertone, F. Cerutti, Luigi Del Debbio, S. Forte, Alberto Guffanti, José I. Latorre, Juan Rojo, M. Ubiali. 2011

467 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We present a determination of the parton distributions of the nucleon from a global set of hard scattering data using the NNPDF methodology including heavy quark mass effects: NNPDF2.1. In comparison to the previous NNPDF2.0 parton determination, the dataset is enlarged to include deep-inelastic charm structure function data. We implement the FONLL-A general-mass scheme in the FastKernel framework and assess its accuracy by comparison to the Les Houches heavy quark benchmarks. We discuss the impact on parton distributions of the treatment of the heavy quark masses, and we provide a determination of the uncertainty in the parton distributions due to uncertainty in the masses. We assess the impact of these uncertainties on LHC observables by providing parton sets with different values of the charm and bottom quark masses. Finally, we construct and discuss parton sets with a fixed number of flavors.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0fad70c855c0e244a67d8424896e7cb4225b603c

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Measurement of Higgs boson production and properties in the WW decay channel with leptonic final states (2013, background): “As a result of the analysis in that control sample, a factor of 1.5± 0.5 with respect to the predicted LO cross section is found.”
Measurements of the properties of the Higgs-like boson in the four lepton decay channel with the ATLAS detector using 25 fb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collision data (2013, methodology): “[47] and by using the PDF sets of CTEQ [48], MSTW [49] and NNPDF [50].”
Performance of b-jet identification in the ATLAS experiment (2015, methodology): “This is accounted for by using three different PDF sets, the nominal CT10 [42] as well as MSTW [34] and NNPDF [66].”
Bottom-quark associated Higgs-boson production: reconciling the four- and five-flavour scheme approach (2011, background): “With the return of four-flavour PDF sets [11, 12, 13], this inconsistency could be removed.”
Heavy-flavour and quarkonium production in the LHC era: from proton–proton to heavy-ion collisions (2015, methodology): “This approach has also been applied to DIS structure functions and is used in the global analyses of PDFs by the NNPDF Collaboration [42,43].”
Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC (2012, unknown): “The uncertainties related to the parton distribution functions amount to ± 8% for the predominantly gluon-initiated ggF and t ¯ tH processes, and ± 4% for the predominantly quark-initiated VBF and WH / ZH processes [78, 134–136].”