Determination of nuclear parton distribution functions and their uncertainties at next-to-leading order

By M. Hirai, Shunzo Kumano, T. Nagai. 2005

337 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Nuclear parton distribution functions (NPDFs) are determined by global analyses of experimental data on structure-function ratios F{sub 2}{sup A}/F{sub 2}{sup A'} and Drell-Yan cross-section ratios {sigma}{sub DY}{sup A}/{sigma}{sub DY}{sup A'}. The analyses are done in the leading order (LO) and next-to-leading order (NLO) of running coupling constant {alpha}{sub s}. Uncertainties of the NPDFs are estimated in both LO and NLO for finding possible NLO improvement. Valence-quark distributions are well determined, and antiquark distributions are also determined at x 0.2. Gluon modifications cannot be fixed at this stage. Although the advantage of the NLO analysis, in comparison with the LO one, is generally the sensitivity to the gluon distributions, gluon uncertainties are almost the same in the LO and NLO. It is because current scaling-violation data are not accurate enough to determine precise nuclear gluon distributions. Modifications of the PDFs in the deuteron are also discussed by including data on the proton-deuteron ratio F{sub 2}{sup D}/F{sub 2}{sup p} in the analysis. A code is provided for calculating the NPDFs and their uncertainties at given x and Q{sup 2} in the LO and NLO.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/502d827b4e4bce313614607b01f324f32f283d83

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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Citations in the corpus

• A Large Hadron Electron Collider at CERN: Report on the Physics and Design Concepts for Machine and Detector (2012, background): “Results are shown from [326] (nDS, black dashed), [327] (HKN07, green solid), [167] (EPS09, red dotted), [329] (FGS10, blue dashed-dotted; in this case the lowest Q(2) is 4 GeV(2) and two lines are drawn reflecting the uncertainty in the predictions) and [328] (DSSZ, cyan dashed-dotted).”
• A facility to search for hidden particles at the CERN SPS: the SHiP physics case (2015, methodology): “In particular, with the SLAC/NMC parametrization, the model from Kulagin and Petti (KP) [1022], and the predictions using the HKN’07 NPDFs [1020].”
• EPS09: A New Generation of NLO and LO Nuclear Parton Distribution Functions (2009, background): “In particular, HKN07 and nDS did not include pion d+Au data which favors the presence of an EMC suppression for gluons.”
• New observables in inclusive production of quarkonia (2019, methodology): “Since the EMC measurement [166], we know that the parton flux inside nuclei –as encoded in nuclear PDF (nPDF)[167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173]– differs from that of in the nucleon used as references.”